Crofts & Assinder

The gap between the quality of the product and the quality of the digital presence was the defining challenge of the project. A brand that supplies the Ritz and fits hardware to Cunard liners was being represented online by a site loading in 13 seconds on mobile, with a Google Lighthouse score of 9. This was an active barrier to the credibility the brand had earned over 150 years.

The structural SEO position compounded this. With only 19 keyword rankings, all branded, Crofts & Assinder had almost no non-branded organic discovery. A benchmarking exercise found that competitors were driving significantly more traffic, but not because they had better sites. They had more content and broader keyword footprints. The whole category was technically weak, and that represented an opportunity as much as a problem.

The product range itself introduced genuine complexity. Two distinct brand offerings, multiple sectors, trade and consumer audiences, multi-language requirements, six price lists across two ranges, and eventual eCommerce: all of it needed to coexist within a design that felt clean and considered rather than cluttered. Premium brands cannot afford visual busyness, and the challenge was building the architecture to handle that complexity without it ever surfacing in the experience.

In tandem with this, we needed to produce a print brochure alongside the website. This was because users such as trade specifiers and architects often move between digital and print research, and a brand that feels inconsistent across those touchpoints loses authority.

There was also a brand perception risk to navigate. Crofts & Assinder manufactures at scale from Birmingham, but manufacturing imagery, handled carelessly, can suggest a small workshop rather than a global supplier. 150 years of heritage, told without care, can feel dusty rather than distinguished. Both required deliberate thinking about how the story was framed.

The design brief was precise: the site needed to feel as considered and refined as the products themselves. A brand that calls its hardware “our jewellery” cannot be served by a functional but generic eCommerce layout.

The visual language was built around restraint. An off-white palette with textural depth, generous whitespace, and careful typography created a design that felt editorial rather than commercial. High-end photography was used throughout, with every layout decision weighted toward letting the product be the focal point rather than competing with it. The KIJO Animation Library was incorporated to add considered motion. Enough to give the experience life, but not enough to distract from the hardware it was presenting.

Bespoke product page templates were developed specifically for Crofts & Assinder, designed to showcase hardware at a luxury level rather than defaulting to standard WooCommerce layouts. The difference matters: a product that sells on finish, detail and craft needs to be presented in a way that communicates those qualities, not in a template built for commodity eCommerce.

Print and Digital, Unified

For a brand operating in architecture, interior design and high-end hospitality, print remains a fundamental part of how business is done: Architects specify from brochures. Interior designers keep printed references on their desks. Hospitality procurement teams receive physical samples alongside printed lookbooks. For Crofts & Assinder’s trade audience, a well-produced brochure acts as a credibility document that circulates through key professional environments.

The website and brochure were developed in parallel, which let KIJO design both within a single visual system rather than treating them as separate briefs. The same photography, typography and layout language used across the site carried straight into the brochure, so neither piece drifted from the other. The result is a coherent brand presence across every customer interaction, whether a designer is browsing the website, receiving a brochure at a trade show, or specifying from a PDF sent by a distributor. At every touchpoint, the brand makes the same impression.

SEO was rebuilt around a structured keyword map of ten themed clusters. This covered core brand and category terms, spaces and applications, product archives, inspiration, heritage and trust, trade, resources, international, conversion, and technical crawl policies. A strict one-primary-keyword-per-page rule was applied throughout, with correct internal linking to reinforce topical authority.

The keyword architecture was designed with generative search in mind; structuring content and clusters for visibility in AI-powered search results, not just classic organic listings. As search behaviour shifts, a site with coherent, intent-led content clusters is better positioned to surface in both environments than one built around volume alone.

The cluster map also addressed a specific competitive vulnerability: brand-name confusion between Crofts & Assinder and a competitor, Croft Architectural, was causing misattributed searches. The keyword strategy was built to intercept this traffic and capture it correctly.

Special Works and Style Guide are distinct in character. One is bespoke, hand-finished luxury; the other is trend-led and interchangeable. Presenting them within the same visual wrapper without differentiation would have diluted both. The sitemap was structured to give each brand offering its own clearly defined area, with separate positioning, visual treatment, and product discovery logic, whilst maintaining the coherence of the overall Crofts & Assinder identity.

The same structural thinking was applied to the trade and consumer journeys. Trade buyers (specifying for hospitality projects, housing developments, or commercial interiors) need different information and a different path to enquiry than say a homeowner browsing for kitchen handles. So, both audiences were mapped and given routes that served their specific intent.
Full eCommerce was scoped as a phased rollout: ERP integration first, transactional eCommerce second. The decision to phase deliberately was the more considered approach. Getting the ERP integration right first meant that when eCommerce launched, it would do so on solid foundations, with product data, stock and orders flowing cleanly rather than being managed manually. Manual management would leave much room for error.

The WooCommerce catalogue was built to handle a product range of genuine complexity: multiple collections, multiple sectors, and significant variation depth within each product. The architecture was designed to scale as the range grows, rather than requiring structural changes every time a new collection or finish is added.

Each product variation (every combination of finish, size and style) carries its own product photography. This is not a standard approach; most eCommerce catalogues use a single hero image per product and ask the customer to imagine the rest. For a product where finish and surface detail are central to the purchase decision, that gap between what a customer sees and what they receive is a meaningful risk. Per-variation photography removes it entirely, and gives customers the confidence to specify correctly. This matters especially in trade and hospitality contexts where orders run to significant quantities.

Custom product filtering allows users to navigate the catalogue by style, application, finish and collection, supporting both the browsing behaviour of a consumer exploring options and the more focussed search of a trade specifier who already knows what they need.

Trade and project buyers can submit enquiries directly from product pages. This was a route built specifically for the B2B side of the business, where hospitality, housing and commercial projects often require bespoke quantities, custom specifications, or pricing conversations that don’t belong in a standard checkout flow.

ERP Integration & International Capability

The ERP integration was one of the most operationally significant parts of the project. A product catalogue of this scale cannot be managed sustainably through manual data handling. Keeping product information, orders and customer records in sync through a reliable ERP connection removes that overhead entirely and gives the business a foundation it can grow from without accumulating operational debt.

Multi-currency functionality was built in to support Crofts & Assinder’s global export operation, allowing international customers to browse and enquire in their local currency. A globe icon in the navigation signals the international-first approach from the first moment a visitor arrives. This may be considered a small detail, but one that communicates reach and confidence to a global audience immediately.

Insights & Resources

The site includes a full resource centre supporting trade specifiers and end consumers at different stages of their buying journey. Downloadable brochures covering ranges, finishes and specification information sit alongside blogs and news, case studies, how-to guides, care and maintenance content, and point-of-sale resources.

The rationale for building this section properly was both SEO and commercial. For trade specifiers, downloadable specification documents and case studies are part of the decision-making process. For consumers, care and how-to content builds confidence and reduces post-purchase friction. A resource centre that serves both audiences well supports conversion and retention simultaneously, while the content depth underpins the keyword clusters the SEO strategy was built around. It also helps to solidify Crofts & Assinder’s authoritative voice and expertise which is highly influential on search engines like Google.

KIJO’s Crofts & Assinder project delivered a transformation on two levels: the visible and the structural. The most immediate result was the performance turnaround: rescuing a mobile Lighthouse score of 9 and a 13-second load time and rebuilding toward 90+ scores across all categories placed Crofts & Assinder ahead of every competitor in a category where technical quality was uniformly poor.

Structurally, the site gave the business something the old one never could: a platform capable of growing with it. The ERP integration removed manual data overhead from the international catalogue. The phased eCommerce approach means transactional capability will launch on solid foundations rather than fragile ones. The SEO architecture replaced 19 branded-only rankings with a framework built for non-branded, high-intent discovery.

Early traffic data supports this. Since Crofts’ project with KIJO started, organic traffic has grown by 13.8%. This is an early signal that the intent-led keyword architecture and performance improvements are beginning to compound in the way the strategy anticipated. As the content clusters mature and the site builds authority in non-branded search, that trajectory should strengthen further.

And perhaps most simply: a brand that supplies the Ritz and fits hardware to Cunard liners now has a digital presence worthy of that heritage. That repositioning was the brief and the site delivers it.
You can experience Crofts & Assinder’s website here.