Chefman is so much more than just another affordable consumer appliance brand. They are innovators of the highest order, with a passion for bringing enjoyable, stress-free, gourmet cooking to the masses.
When Chefman approached Forwardslash, they were enjoying fast-growing sales, making significant inroads with retailers, and growing a loyal consumer following evidenced by thousands of buyers opting into the Club Chefman community.
The problem? Their flagship site portrayed an uninspired, downmarket and lifeless brand—wholly inconsistent with the fresh, bold brand image and immersive brand experience that the Chefman team had worked hard to create.
Working closely with the Chefman team, Forwardslash set out to help Chefman garner the love and attention of consumers and corporate buyers alike with a website that powerfully reflected Chefman’s brand ethos, brought their 360° brand experience to life through every touchpoint, and earned them coveted shelf space in big-box stores.
More than a modern-looking, easily navigable product catalogue, we aimed to create a beautiful product showcase that made discovering new products an enjoyable, frictionless experience. And, of course, one that built desire and appeal for each product category and individual product, so it could truly shine.
But more than a pretty face, we wanted to build a product showcase that the client could manage seamlessly themselves; one that could grow, shift, and develop as they did, sustaining their growth far into the future—while remaining just as beautiful and user-friendly as it was on day one.
Far from a standard product-based template, we built a robust, fully customized content management platform that enables the Chefman team to manage the site themselves and easily update content as needed while retaining the site’s consistent, beautiful, and branded front-end design.
Chefman’s website was an opportunity to answer one simple question in the minds of corporate buyers and consumers: Why them? To help ensure people chose Chefman over competing brands, the website needed to convey that they stand behind their products and are committed to delivering value to their customers—both tangible (affordable, well-designed products) and intangible (the confidence to master gourmet cooking at home).
We took the powerful brand platform Chefman had executed across its existing collateral and elegantly carried it over to the web, giving Chefman an immediately recognizable online presence that matched and reinforced what consumers saw in the store.
We often say that there’s a logic behind the magic. A project of this size, scope, and complexity requires immaculate planning and precision—not to mention a heaping dose of client trust and collaboration. From client workshops to competitive research, prototyping to user testing, data migration to quality assurance, the devil is in the details. And without the infrastructure that allows those details to fall into place, even the most creative ideas and most robust development mean very little.
More than just a solid brand, an intuitive design, and a compelling message, the success of Chefman.com came down to a honed process of cooperation Forwardslash’s team of creative, strategic, and web development experts, working quickly and efficiently to iterate and analyze; build and deploy.
