Six more brands, six more markets

A portfolio brand is not a translation of the flagship. Defy sells into South Africa, Arctic into Romania, Elektra Bregenz into Austria, Leisure into the UK. The product catalogue overlaps; almost nothing else does. Retail structure differs, service expectations differ, the device and connection profile of the average visitor differs, and the language does more than change the words — German compounds break layouts that Turkish and Romanian sit inside comfortably.

Handled brand by brand, this becomes six independent projects with six maintenance futures. Handled as one template, it produces six sites that are each slightly wrong for the market they are in.

One system, with market difference expressed as configuration rather than as exception.

We treated locale as a first-class input to the design, not a step at the end. Components were specified against their longest realistic string rather than their prettiest one, so a German label does not break a card that a Turkish label fits. Layouts were built to reflow rather than to hold a fixed composition. Where a market genuinely needed a different pattern — a different service journey, a different retailer handoff — that became a documented variant with a stated reason, not an undocumented local edit.

UI systems per brand, each drawing on the shared component vocabulary and carrying its own token set — so the brands look like themselves without behaving differently.

Web interfaces across the pages that actually carry the commercial weight: product listing and detail, comparison, support and registration, where-to-buy.

Localisation-aware components. Text expansion, number and date formatting, and per-market content slots handled inside the component rather than patched around it.

A performance posture. In several of these markets a meaningful share of traffic arrives on mid-range Android over a mobile connection. Image strategy, font loading and layout stability were treated as design decisions, because for that visitor they are the design.

Six brands ship interfaces built on one system. Combined with the Whirlpool group work and the Beko and Grundig design system, twelve appliance brands across two competing manufacturing groups run on interfaces we designed — which is the reference we would point a global client to, because it is unusual and because it is checkable.

Per-market commercial results belong to the client.