Case study · Brand and e-commerce
Rebuilding a German seat maker's US brand and storefront.
The marketing, design, and branding hire at a five-person company, where I replaced a website only one outside contractor could edit with a self-serve store, and built the brand from the ground up.
The situation
A heritage product with no way to sell it online.
scheel-mann USA is the US arm of scheel, a German maker of handmade, small-batch orthopedic seats built in Stuttgart since the sixties. A husband and wife run the US distribution. The whole team was the two of them, me, a sales lead, a shop lead, and a warehouse lead.
The website ran on a custom content system built by a local developer. Every edit meant emailing him, it didn't look professional, and it had no e-commerce at all.
The approach
Give a small team a brand and a store they could run.
I moved the entire site to Shopify with a fully custom theme, so the team could sell online and edit the site themselves for the first time. Alongside it I built the complete brand book: typography, layouts, standards, colors, and business cards. On a team this size, I also covered whatever product and marketing work needed a designer.
The work
Shopify store and custom theme
A self-serve storefront replacing a site only one outside contractor could edit, with e-commerce built in for the first time.
Brand book
Typography, layouts, color, standards, and business cards, built from scratch.
Product development
A remade chair whose prototypes came back poor. I drew and described the design changes the team needed to communicate to the factory, and produced install-guide drawings.
Race truck livery
A vintage-inspired racing livery for the company's NORRA race truck, which became one of its most popular pieces of brand artwork.