Whether you’re entering a code into the keyless door lock at your weekend rental or swiping your employee nametag to enter the office, secure entry and access points are everywhere—and when they work seamlessly, you hardly notice them. Headquartered in Rümlang, Switzerland, dormakaba has been delivering cutting-edge solutions to the access control industry since 1862, and has built a reputation for products that are innovative, functional, and aesthetically appealing.
Once separate brands, Dorma and Kaba combined their 150+ years of experience in 2015 to offer customers even safer, more secure, and sustainable security options. dormakaba has since acquired many companies along its growth journey, each with their own products and style. With more than 16,000 employees working from 39 countries, the distributed workforce faced the challenge of creating a consistent brand presence.
Historically, dormakaba’s website was owned by their IT team. When Vincent Tervooren joined as Head of Digital Marketing & Technology, he took over, still collaborating closely with IT to lead what is known as the company’s digital “Center of Excellence.” The team was tasked to find a way to centralize web development workflows while giving design and marketing the creative autonomy to properly promote their products.
Streamlining independent workflows to create a unified brand
Webflow empowers us to centralize our global, digital brand and ensure the look and feel of our marketing sites stay consistent.
At the heart of dormakaba are its world-class products—and behind each one is a dedicated, distributed marketing team. Historically, to create conversion-driving landing pages, they would work with their own agencies, who would then present something in WordPress, Contentful, or a custom-built CMS. This resulted in pages that felt disconnected from the overall dormakaba brand. It was expensive, too: Each landing page cost around a middle five-digit number, which meant they were spending upwards of half a million dollars on web projects annually, leaving them very little budget to promote the actual pages.
dormakaba’s custom CMS reached its limits quickly, with few options for customization. They needed flexibility to create landing pages and microsites with elevated designs, and the ability to make changes easily and quickly.
Vincent was aware of visual development platforms, and once he started digging into the space, it was clear that Webflow Enterprise was the solution for dormakaba. “Webflow is especially appealing for nontechnical marketers like myself who aren’t very good at code,” he says.
Managing the front end was complex with other platforms. But with Webflow, the breakpoints among devices and animations were straightforward, and the ease of creating new fields in CMS collections and surfacing them dynamically on sites was seamless. Webflow was not only simple to use, but dynamic enough to give dormakaba the design functionality and freedom they were after. “Webflow was the most future-proof option,” says Vincent.
Bringing the brand to life 4 times faster
Webflow gives us the flexibility to create any front-end design without limitations... We have creativity with no limits.
To convert prospective customers, the team wanted to showcase dormakaba’s brand in a way that would inform and inspire architects, builders, and planners. As they built out a new global “access3” microsite, they used Webflow to easily test layouts, iterate quickly, and apply them to their design systems. In addition to showing the possibilities of dormakaba’s products in action, they also wanted access3 to serve as a knowledge center with curated resources and content to help with their SEO efforts.
The dormakaba team also used Webflow components to maintain a consistent, efficient and scalable design workflow with customizable blocks. They can now easily reuse those blocks across their site, and make changes in a single place that will replicate in recurring layouts. “Adding new categories or new content types is amazingly simple and fast. We can improve the CMS data structure, adding new fields in minutes, whereas the process with traditional CMS platforms would have been 10x more work,” says dormakaba’s Global Website Product Owner Jose Juan “JJ” Lopez. This improvement in CMS workflows means that the team can release new content faster, and with less resources.
To create a more engaging user experience, Vincent and team tapped into Webflow’s features to integrate video animations throughout the site. Instead of simple static images or screenshots, a slow-motion preview begins every time a user’s cursor hovers over a video. The microsite was also seamlessly translated into five languages and the team is also leveraging Webflow’s SEO controls to fine-tune conversion.
Each page also has a call to action encouraging prospective customers to reach out for more information. To facilitate engagement, Vincent’s team built native contact forms on the front end, which connect to various marketing automation tools. With Webflow, the web build is automatically optimized for desktop and mobile—ensuring responsiveness no matter where users view content.
It took about one month to create the new and improved access3 website—which is four times faster than previous site builds. "Webflow allowed us to bring the brand to life quickly, while letting us push the creative boundaries," says Vincent.
Strengthening and scaling dormakaba’s global brand
With Webflow, we can focus on feature development, and bringing that more cohesive, consistent brand to life with less resources.
Vincent’s team now builds as much as possible in Webflow, which speeds up the process for dormakaba’s global marketing teams. Using components, they can tailor sections of content to their liking, and then iterate each one — improving the look and feel as they go. “Interactivity and animations are usually a pain, but with Webflow, it’s quite easy to do and allows us to consistently elevate our visual designs,” JJ says.
As they continue to implement Webflow across more areas of their site, Vincent’s digital Center of Excellence sets the example, providing easy-to-use solutions for their distributed workforce. Several local teams in France, Switzerland, and Germany have Editor access, giving them the flexibility to confidently make their own changes (while operating within guardrails). And if they ever get stuck, they can reach out to their Webflow Enterprise Account Team: “Having a dedicated team we can strategize with makes such a difference. Webflow eliminates a lot of internal friction and helps us enable our global teams,” says JJ.
Having left its legacy web environment behind, dormakaba can shift resources to support the company’s marketing and business objectives. “With Webflow, we can focus on feature development, and bringing that more cohesive, consistent brand to life with less resources,” says Vincent.
