Reckitt slashes the cost of managing multiple brands online

Reckitt is a British multinational consumer goods company that provides health, hygiene, and nutrition products to households around the world.

Its brands are globally recognised category leaders – from Durex  to Cillit-Bang – and each is supported by its own dedicated website.

These websites play a key role in brand equity and raising the global profile of brands within the group. The sites support sales, by connecting customers with relevant ecommerce stores, and they provide value-add expert advice to consumers. 

But the design, development, and maintenance of hundreds of different websites around the world was a significant time and cost investment for Reckitt.

The consumer goods giant therefore needed a streamlined and scalable way to:

• Manage and grow this digital estate, effectively and affordably, without duplicating effort with each additional brand and market.
• Ensure a consistent, high quality, and accessible experience across all the brand sites.

Developing an MVP

Working collaboratively with Reckitt’s Head of Global UX, we developed an MVP global design system, with modular components that addressed the primary business and user needs. 

We ensured that the MVP integrated with Reckitt’s own deployment platform, making adoption as easy as possible for brands and local markets. 

Integrating design and delivery 

Another key focus was establishing processes to improve collaboration and ensure the seamless handover of assets between design and development teams.

To support brand and regional marketing teams, we established a Design System Guardian role to own the system and ensure it delivers ongoing value to teams.  

Testing, deployment, and continuous improvement

Our MVP succeeded in helping Reckitt teams spin up high quality websites in a hugely reduced timeframe.

Ongoing iterations allowed us to continuously improve and scale the system while stress testing and validating designs with customers and brand marketing teams.
  
We’re now focused on applying the design system to additional Reckitt brands and exploring how a headless CMS could drive even more efficiencies.

We enabled Reckitt to slash the time and cost required to manage brands online, simplifying site design with a design system and reusable components.

By systemising website design and delivery across its portfolio, we gave Reckitt an efficient, modular, and scalable way to deliver a consistent, high quality, and accessible user experience across its brand portfolio. 

A huge 96% of websites built with the design system now have the highest accessibility scores in Reckitt’s global portfolio.

Together with Reckitt, we’ve delivered five new brand sites and counting. Any brand in any location will be able use the system’s reusable modules, components, and functionality to design and deliver a high performance website in just two weeks. 

These sites are guaranteed to meet Reckitt’s global standards, but can be customised and tailored to support local requirements and a brand’s individual needs and goals.

The result is a scalable approach that reduces time to market and ensures compliance with accessibility guidelines. 

As Reckitt’s long-standing CX partner, we’re bringing more brands onto the system, expanding it to support the likes of animation and parallax for more engaging brand experiences.