Techtronic Industries (TTI)

The Client

Techtronic Industries (TTI) is a global leader in power tools, with prominent brands including RYOBI, AEG Power Tools, Kango, and Empire. As the digital storefront for these brands, TTI's websites play an essential role in driving sales through retail partners while supporting customers' pre-purchase research. The RYOBI brand alone receives more than 20 million visitors to its websites worldwide, requiring a digital presence that reflects the quality and status of these premium tool brands.

The Situation

TTI faced numerous challenges with its digital platforms, which resided on an old, slow, and unsupported custom-built CMS. The restrictive platform required expensive development efforts for even simple changes, limiting TTI's ability to respond to current requirements or future business opportunities efficiently. For example, creating a single new content page took over three months of hardcoded development with an international developer. 

Additionally, frequent downtime across all brands resulted in substantial costs. Asset storage was inconsistent and poorly structured, while product information was inconsistently presented across websites, resulting in consumer confusion and a disjointed experience. TTI recognized an opportunity to become an industry leader with its digital experience, providing a superior user experience that would differentiate its brands in the marketplace.

The Challenge

TTI encountered numerous hurdles on the path to overhauling its digital presence:

• Short timelines due to outdated and unsupported code creating security vulnerabilities
• An undefined technology approach that required extensive discovery before selecting a solution
• Multi-brand and multi-geography requirements that demanded distinct designs while maintaining consistency
• Unique functionality across different brands, including RYOBI's Inspiration Hub, AEG Power Tool redemptions, and wishlist features
• Data inconsistency and unavailability across 4,000+ products, requiring teams to create 188,000 new data fields
• Complex stakeholder management involving 40+ stakeholders from 10 business units
• New system integrations, including the implementation of a Product Information Management (PIM) system
• Migration of approximately 15,000 visual assets from various internal network drives to the new DAM

The Solution

Partnering with Bliss Digital, TTI executed a data-driven, user-centered website modernization strategy:

Discovery and research: The team conducted extensive customer and stakeholder research to understand user needs and purchase journeys, engaging 40 participants across eight workshop sessions to gather input from a broad spectrum of internal teams.

User-centered design: TTI developed interactive wireframes based on research findings and conducted usability testing with representative customers to optimize major aspects of the customer journey and information architecture before proceeding to visual design.

Brand differentiation: The solution balanced unique brand identities with a consistent structure, leveraging Acquia's multi-site approach with shared components to deliver distinct designs for each brand while streamlining development.

System integration: TTI prioritized early sprints to ensure connectivity between Drupal, DAM, PIM, and external APIs (Reviews, Pricing, and Stock Availability), bringing automation to product launch processes and saving hundreds of manual hours.

Data transformation: The team reviewed and repurposed 27,000 existing product data fields and created 188,000 new data fields across four brands and two regions, engaging the entire product team to complete data mapping and auditing 1,600 products ahead of launch.

Component-based development: TTI used Acquia Site Studio to deliver components more rapidly, focusing initially on a single master site with functionality that could be leveraged across remaining brand websites.

Personalization and optimization: TTI used Acquia Convert, allowing ongoing personalization and A/B testing and starting a program of continuous improvement that quickly delivered measurable results.

The teams received additional specialized expertise from DXC for Product Information Management development, project management consultants DQA, and StudioHawk for SEO optimization throughout the project lifecycle.

The Results

TTI's multi-brand digital overhaul led to dramatic performance improvements across all measured metrics:

Improved efficiency: Integrating Acquia with the PIM and DAM allowed the organization to decentralize asset uploads and bulk processing capabilities, increasing product launch efficiency by an incredible 300% from the previous two-week benchmark.

Enhanced website speed: Page load times were dramatically reduced from 33 seconds to just five seconds for the RYOBI brand, with overall site scores improving from D to B in GT Metrix within the first three months. Kango and Empire websites achieved even better performance with 2.5-second load times and A ratings.

SEO performance gains: The RYOBI site saw a 364% increase in indexed pages (from 563 to 2,641), with engaged organic sessions increasing by 66% and retailer clicks from organic search up 28%. Other brands experienced 25-28% increases in organic search traffic and hundreds of thousands of additional impressions in Google Search.

Quality improvements: Site health scores increased substantially across all brands, with Empire reaching 84%, Kango 83%, AEG Power Tools 78%, and RYOBI improving from 68% to 80% within three months post-launch.

Enhanced user engagement: The new RYOBI Australia website drove increases in overall site engagement, with 4% longer engagement time, 3% growth in active users, and 20% more customer interactions (page scrolls), while content errors decreased by 48%.

Feature development: Freed from manual updates, the development team delivered new capabilities that increased retailer checkout value within just three weeks of launch.

Conversion optimization: A/B testing through Acquia Convert increased retailer referrals by 12% within the first two months of testing.

Since launch, the transformation project achieved an additional seven million impressions in Google Search, positioning TTI as a digital leader within the power tools industry. By shifting from keeping legacy systems operational to investing in new features and experiences, TTI has the foundation to build and optimize increasingly complex, personalized customer journeys across all its brands.