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Updating a Website and Branding That’s Sixty Years Young
The Gist
Shrader Canada recently celebrated a big milestone – 60 years in business as a leader of chemical solutions. Since its start in 1955, the company has worked with major automotive OEMs and built a solid reputation as a trusted private label partner. In anticipation of attending AAPEX/SEMA, a major industry tradeshow being co-branded with their brand Titan Chemicals, the company was ready to upgrade its look with a new website and branding initiative.
The Challenge
To stand out in the B2B space, a space that is often crowded with dated websites and lacklustre visuals, Shrader knew they had to pop. A shiny, new “outside” could help to convey the power under their hood as they modernized within a mature industry by leveraging digital and data.
The Job
We brought in the design-driven team at PB+J to help bring to life the vision of a modern, sophisticated Shrader. From updating the company’s icon logo, to setting a powerful colour palette and brand guideline, to styling the look and feel of the site’s imagery, we were able to extract the essence of Shrader’s heritage and translate it into the digital age.
Bringing the power of digital to the internal team was also an important objective, so we built the site on the ever-user-friendly Squarespace platform. We were able to maximize core capabilities of design, SEO and mobile responsiveness while also simplifying life through an easy-to-use backend. With the ability to grow and evolve as the company needed more functionality, the site was primed for the next generation of change.


Results
When Google updated its algorithm to factor mobile-friendliness as a key component in search rankings, stale B2B websites should have been shaking in their boots. But Shrader could rest easy with its slick new setup – mobile and tablet visits actually increased since launch, exceeding industry norms at up to 20% of monthly traffic. In fact, website visits overall have trended upward since launch with traffic gains upwards of 50%. Here’s a post about Squarespace’s mobile-preparedness.
Awwwards outlines the importance of designing your website with responsiveness in mind, and you can always scan your site through Google’s free tool to see how you stack up.
As the Shrader website launched in the fall of 2015 prior to the AAPEX/SEMA tradeshow in Las Vegas, NV, the company secured the sponsorship of the show’s keynote address with former Tesla exec, Louis Efron (Head of Global Employee Engagement). This branding opportunity provided major exposure for the company at such a hot industry gathering, and treated customers to front row seats at Efron’s inspiring talk. You can also check out what Shrader’s other brand, Titan Chemicals, got up to at AAPEX.
In Closing
Managing a brilliant redesign project was made possible with a great team and a great client. While updating the look and feel of a company may be terrifying or confusing to some, Shrader took on the makeover challenge with passion and determination. A well-planned, thoughtful approach to web design resulted in a site with stellar engagement metrics (page consumption, session duration, bounce rate) that is poised to grow into the company’s next milestone.
