Active Matter were approached by AluFold direct to help them revolutionise both their customer experience and their internal processes. After examining their requirements and talking through what they wanted to achieve, we knew very quickly that Sanity would sit at the heart of the consumer-facing side of this.
Part one of this multi-stage project is an overhaul of AluFold Direct's website. This new platform, powered by Sanity and Next.JS, represents a huge step forward for the brand, and lays a marker in the sand for the industry.
We have leveraged many of Sanity's greatest features in delivering this project. A collaborative editing experience, customised studio structures grouping singletons and content together, as well as web preview tabs, and a rich editing environment with component previews in-line in the studio.
We have also heavily customised certain pieces of the studio behind the scenes. For instance, AluFold Direct's online quoting system is powered through this studio, and we needed a way to update pricing structures quickly and efficiently, without having to manually re-key mountains of data. Custom input components, complete with paste handlers, were created, allowing us to input huge tables of data which didn't exist anywhere other than in an Excel spreadsheet in one go, and have the Sanity content model updated instantly. The rich editing experience is all made possible by the fact that Sanity Studio is just a React application, and we can add new components to that as we see fit. This is incredibly powerful for content editors, who can now get a feel for how their content is going to work and look without even needing to open a preview!
Whilst this project would clearly have been possible with another content solution at its heart, I can say with 100% certainty that it would have been more challenging to develop, and wouldn't be as easy for content editors to work with. The fact that this is a true platform that the client can build on for the coming years makes the investment to get this built all the better value.
