Mohawk Group
Digital Transformation From the Ground Up
What if...shopping for quality flooring could be easy for residential and commercial customers alike?
Mohawk Industries is the world’s leading producer and distributor of residential and commercial flooring materials. Mohawk’s industry-leading innovation has created products and technologies that differentiate the brand in the marketplace, providing advantages in the production of carpeting and rugs, as well as ceramic tile, laminate, wood, stone, and vinyl flooring.
Starting Off on the Right Foot
Two of Mohawk Industries’ largest divisions, Mohawk Flooring and Mohawk Group, were struggling with outdated websites that weren’t meeting customer needs. We were initially engaged to redesign the Mohawk Group website and enhance the existing Mohawk Flooring website. Since then, we have partnered with Mohawk on a variety of other digital experience projects.
Empowering Teams With Real-Time Product Data
One of our first engagements with Mohawk was creating a custom solution to manage the company’s product data. Mohawk had previously struggled with a disparate set of tools for managing this information across its various departments. The marketing team, for example, had to manually track product information on spreadsheets, making it difficult and time-consuming to keep the company’s websites up to date.
We leveraged Sitecore to create a custom database that provides Mohawk teams with accurate product information and availability in near-real time. Having this system in place, and the data readily available, has empowered employees across the company and streamlined the process of updating the company’s websites.
Rolling Out the Red Carpet
MohawkFlooring.com is the primary point of entry for customers looking to purchase residential products through a Mohawk distributor. Customers were using the site to find products, but there was no way to identify which products were carried by nearby dealers, and some customers found that the retailers they visited didn’t carry the specific product they wanted.
We built an updated website using Sitecore that allows customers to search by zip code and locate products available nearby. This meant bridging the data for every product, including color options and retailers, and combining that with geolocation information to produce the list of retailers that carry the customer’s desired product. This amounted to more than 31 million data points across the site.
We also integrated an interface we had previously created using Adobe Scene7 that allows the customer to view samples and color swatches in a rendered room setting. With more viewing options and the ability to check whether nearby retailers carry the products they are looking for, customers are now accurately informed about their choices throughout the purchase path.
A Customer Experience That Shines
Mohawk Group, the commercial flooring division of Mohawk Industries, had an outdated website with limited functionality and minimal features. With only static product images available online, designers had to rely on physical swatches to show flooring options to their customers, who often found it difficult to visualize how the finished installation would look.
Mohawk Group was also struggling with brand recognition for Durkan, its custom hospitality carpet division. Durkan.com was functioning as its own website, which disconnected the two brands and increased the cost of web maintenance and management.
We worked with Mohawk Group to conduct in-depth user research and then used Sitecore to design a highly complex, data-driven site that solves the brand’s most critical user needs. We also integrated the Durkan brand into the Mohawk Group website, helping to streamline brand recognition while reducing the costs of managing two separate websites.
Visualizing the End Result
One of the Mohawk Group website’s most unique features is an advanced product visualization tool. Users are able to view products and select from more than 15 different room types, five installation patterns, and an adjustable light setting to render a room and showcase what a complete installation would look like.
As users move through the site, they’re able to download, save, and share each custom rendering they create, making it easier to showcase product selections to teammates and clients.
Mohawk Group now has one website that allows customers to visually customize complete flooring installments, helping to increase consumer confidence throughout the buying process.
Quality Products, Ready to Go
Mohawk Group also needed a site that would showcase only products that are available to ship within 24 hours. Without this capability, there was a risk for customers to choose a product on backorder, thus creating a frustrating and negative customer experience.
We built the Mohawk Ready to Ship web application. The site gives builders, retailers, and wholesalers access to up-to-date product and availability information.
By pulling thousands of data points from multiple sources into a single reference guide, commercial clients can search Ready to Ship based on brand, style, size, footage, cost, and more. Users can drill down far enough to see the exact number of available units in order to make an informed purchasing decision.
Wall-to-Wall Digital Marketing
In addition to creating these enhanced websites, we implemented Adobe Analytics to help Mohawk Group and Mohawk Flooring more accurately track and measure customer engagement. We also provided long-term analytics support, including managing tracking updates and enhancements, report creation and automation, and ad-hoc analysis.
Our digital marketing experts have also worked with Mohawk Industries to develop strategies that would drive its pay-per-click (PPC) advertising efforts and to optimize the Mohawk Flooring and Mohawk Group websites for search, as well as landing pages targeted toward retailers that carry Mohawk products.
Bringing the Brands Together
Mohawk Industries also engaged our strategy experts to help evaluate more than 18 individual brands the company had acquired over a period of several years. The project included ranking each based on brand recognition and product type, and then consolidating them into seven brands: Aladdin, Karastan, Mohawk Home, Pergo, Portico, and the Mohawk brand itself.
The next steps included migrating each brand’s legacy website to Sitecore and Adobe Analytics so they could be integrated into Mohawk’s online presence. This integration included updating the look and feel of the websites, adding a brand navigation bar to the Mohawk site, and leveraging core components within Sitecore to keep costs down.
Our solutions enabled Mohawk to elevate its family of brands and present an organized and cohesive experience for each while still catering to the brands’ unique qualities and audiences. Having each brand on the same platform also allows customers to easily browse across multiple brands and product types, facilitates cost savings, and makes it easy for Mohawk teams to update content and conduct analytics.
A Strategy for Luxury
Following the integration of the 18 sub-brands into Mohawk’s web presence, we were asked to complete more in-depth strategy and branding work for the company’s luxury brand, Karastan.
One of the first steps was to develop a brand strategy that would complement the luxury look and feel Karastan products are known for. After extensive research, our expert strategists presented a strategy that will accomplish these goals, while also helping the company reach a new generation of luxury shoppers, Millennials, whose view on luxury emphasizes products with history and character over the exclusivity valued by previous generations.
We redesigned the Karastan website to be more user-friendly and provide an inspiration-driven experience so that shoppers can explore products based on style, rather than the traditional parameters like color, price, and size.
We also updated the site’s taxonomy, rewrote the content, provided direction on photography, and integrated blog and social components into the main page. The redesigned site showcases Karastan products in an organized and stylish interface while presenting a cohesive experience that is aligned with Mohawk and its other brands.
Results
Taking Care of the Dealers
Mohawk Industries also engaged us to help the company leverage digital marketing to better connect with the dealers that carry Mohawk products.
Through these efforts, which included incentives programs, paid search advertising, and landing pages tailored to the dealer, Mohawk can now market to the dealers who interface directly with its end customers. This enables the company to create joint marketing opportunities, promote dealer loyalty, and better reach end users.
Related Success Stories
Ready to Begin Your Story?
Rolling Out the Red Carpet
MohawkFlooring.com is the primary point of entry for customers looking to purchase residential products through a Mohawk distributor. Customers were using the site to find products, but there was no way to identify which products were carried by nearby dealers, and some customers found that the retailers they visited didn’t carry the specific product they wanted.
We built an updated website using Sitecore that allows customers to search by zip code and locate products available nearby. This meant bridging the data for every product, including color options and retailers, and combining that with geolocation information to produce the list of retailers that carry the customer’s desired product. This amounted to more than 31 million data points across the site.
We also integrated an interface we had previously created using Adobe Scene7 that allows the customer to view samples and color swatches in a rendered room setting. With more viewing options and the ability to check whether nearby retailers carry the products they are looking for, customers are now accurately informed about their choices throughout the purchase path.