Locke

Futureproofing for success

The Locke website did not reflect its new overarching branding, nor was it suited to support its international growth plans. The team was keen to streamline the technology in order to enable future growth and flexibility. They required a scalable core that could one day facilitate and showcase other edyn brands while ensuring future content sat within established guidelines.

Challenges

This project presented challenges on two levels—the specific needs of the Locke website, as well as the requirements of the centralized back office.

The Locke website needed to reflect the brand’s new overarching personality while providing design flexibility. It also needed to support customer retention initiatives.  
Key goals were to:

• Consolidate fragmented technology
• Update branding
• Enable proposition showcasing at the property level
• Better position the brand for international growth (e.g. multilingual capabilities)
• Actively support customer retention initiatives

The project required an enterprise platform that could scale to support a multi-brand portfolio, while allowing for distinctive propositions of individual properties.

 Some of the requirements were:

• Capable of handling complex integrations
• Multi-lingual support  
• Fast cloud-based server capability
• Delivery of personalized experiences using CRM insights
• Built-in website integrity and search engine best practice

Kentico was the right fit for this project because it provides a trusted, reliable, and secure platform that could scale across the portfolio of websites. Also, its marketing functionality matched the company’s ambitions in providing exciting personalized user experiences to the varied customers of the Locke brand.

Solution

Kentico’s feature set was central to the website’s success. The team leveraged the MVC framework and web farms for page speed and scalability, and the sophisticated customer experience capabilities to track and adapt the user journey.

The team found the flexibility of widgets invaluable in delivering a framework with which to build engaging pages without them feeling in any way templated. The widget approach also enabled personalization, with key areas of content able to change without causing front-end issues or needing excessive back-end support.  

The flexibility of Kentico provided seamless integration with various third-party tools and software, including Blue Octopus, ClickDimensions, and Mews.

Results

By choosing Kentico, all business and technology demands were met, while ensuring strong performance against core metrics. The DXP’s flexibility enabled the site to reflect the Locke brand identity, and its ease of use means that building pages and updating copy and media is more intuitive and efficient than before.

Organic traffic has grown thanks to improved performance and UX, and the site was rated 100 for site accessibility and 98 for SEO on Google’s Core Web Vitals.

The website has helped Locke to continue its growth trajectory and supports its digital transformation goals. The company has since opened a new location in London and has several new locations set for later this year.

As Locke continues to expand globally, the website will grow to feature listings in more countries and include further languages. Designed for scalability from day one, their site will be able support technology and marketing goals for many years to come.

The client says:

Adrian Swinbourne, Director of Digital & Marketing Communications, edyn:

“Our vision is to deliver scalable and unique website platforms which truly bring each brand to life. Kentico’s flexibility to work across the different needs of our brands as well as integrate with our systems, made it a clear choice. Working with our partner Crafted, the process was seamless from start to finish and the outcome surpassed our expectations.”