Milliken

Growing pains are a normal part of the process for even the most established companies as they expand and innovate. But with the right partnership, growing pains can turn into growing opportunities. 
 

Milliken has been a leading manufacturer of flooring, textiles, chemical, and healthcare products for 150+ years. Despite their rich history and innovative advancements, Milliken faced significant challenges due to rapid growth fueled by new acquisitions and numerous product launches.  

As a result, the company's digital presence had become fragmented, with 45 websites spread over more than five different platforms. This decentralization hindered new customers from efficiently finding the right products and taking the next step to contact a sales rep. Milliken recognized the need for a streamlined solution to enhance customers’ experiences and unify their online presence across their owned brands.  

The new Milliken website experience needed to streamline the customer acquisition funnel and easily showcase the wide breadth of offerings across verticals, all while elevating and celebrating the Milliken brand. 

The sheer number of websites and platforms for Milliken’s global brands created confusion for users navigating between digital destinations. This fragmentation led to customers encountering irrelevant products and information, detracting from the overall user experience.

Reducing the proliferation of domains into a streamlined customer experience required a multi-phased approach.  

First, Horizontal conducted stakeholder interviews and in-depth discovery sessions to align on an understanding of what barriers customers were experiencing across the entire user journey. After 50+ interviews across 10 different teams, the most critical content and functionality was identified—creating the best MVP roadmap and establishing a baseline for redesign. 

Horizontal then set out to identify customer interaction patterns and audit usability issues to restructure their site’s components and enable new features (like product filtering and global search abilities). 

• Through close collaboration with Milliken’s team, Horizontal: 
• Created a digital experience that expresses Milliken’s brand story and values. 
• Tied together their disparate brand sites under one main Sitecore platform. 
• Centralized their asset repository across multiple domains to reduce maintenance costs and personalize content. 
• Simplified the user experience for faster, easier interactions. 
• Enhanced the site’s language translation, search capabilities, and multi-regional infrastructure for content delivery. 
• Built a framework for tracking customer engagement across channels. 
• Prepared the website for self-service and consistent lead nurturing.