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Fortifying a House of Brands

Case Study
Redesign
Alongside our Hormel Foods Communications friends, we successfully re-platformed hormel.com to be a future-friendly, multi-brand experience for consumers and editors alike.
avocado bacon toast

Stemming from our partnership with corporately-focused Hormel Foods, we helped its consumer-facing brand tackle one of it’s most daunting projects: a massive website evolution.

28
External Usability Studies
800+
Recipes

We created a site that’s both a utility for consumers who aren’t aware of the breadth of products at Hormel Foods and a highly on-brand marketing platform.

Beth Hillson Senior Communications Manager, Hormel Foods
200+
Products
19
Brands
In This Case Study
  • Chapter One Organization Giving structure to a *lot* of information
  • Chapter Two Performance Creating a snappy frontend & frictionless backend
  • Chapter Three Expression Balancing convention with brand personality
  • Chapter Four Discovery Making pathways & crossroads to all things Hormel
01

Organization

Giving structure to a *lot* of information
Chapter One

Naturally, the Hormel brand sits in the front seat of the site and serves as the umbrella for 19(!) unique brand experiences, over 200 products, and 800+ recipes. By syncing data with their product information management system, we eliminated the fussy, manual method of achieving in-store accuracy on the site.

Built with WordPress Multisite, each brand’s presentation is also derived from a core theme. This approach allows each brand to dip into a shared set of building blocks and modify colors, fonts, and artwork to align with its own unique brand guidelines. Through Multisite, we also checked a significant box by providing Hormel with a centralized editing experience.

02

Performance

Creating a snappy frontend & frictionless backend
Chapter Two

UX interviews highlighted some painfully slow page loads, so we’re proud to have dramatically increased overall page speed, especially on mobile devices.

Upgrading to WordPress helped Hormel streamline the resources spent editing the website, but it also helped to address a critical cybersecurity issue. That, combined with the Salsify sync, has drastically decreased the amount of time and effort spent making even minor updates.

(Exasperated) There’s gotta be a quicker way to do this.

Deanna Attempting to load the previous recipe page
7X Faster
Recipe Search Page Load Speed
03

Expression

Balancing convention with brand personality
Chapter Three

One of the biggest challenges for a site of this scale is accommodating individual brand personality within the broader benefit of site-wide reusability. In pursuit of this, we pushed our block design to be as expressive as they are functional. Our large-scale billboards and animated marquees help capture the spirit of Hormel’s brands, while other utility blocks have a lot of content flexibility.

04

Discovery

Making pathways & crossroads to all things Hormel
Chapter Four

Knowing that utility often plays such a big role in the success of large-scale sites, we dialed in the product and recipe search tools at both the umbrella and individual brand levels. Consumers also told us how important it is to see products used unconventionally, which we’re able to support with a steady cadence of promotional zones.

Hormel.com proved to be the kind of site that gets the most out of our design and development know-how.

Some of our best ideas are in service to scale and personality, arguably the site’s most important hallmarks. Combined with a rock-solid project team from Hormel, we’re all incredibly proud of this evolution. An ongoing commitment to iterate and improve on the work will undoubtedly help hormel.com bring usefulness and delight to its consumers.

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