IDEX Fire & Safety

The Company

IDEX’s brands of Fire & Safety have been trusted for centuries. For them, it’s personal: many team members are current or former first responders, or share close ties with those who are.

Because of this, IDEX and its portfolio of brands, including HURST Jaws of Life, Hale, and Akron Brass, care about more than just technical expertise: they bring a deep understanding and appreciation of the items they sell. They, and their customers, recognize the value of tools that perform under pressure and systems that work together seamlessly.

With this in mind, they partnered with Wasserman Digital to create a digital experience that saves their buyers’ time and streamlines backend complexity so they can focus on what matters most: keeping communities safe.

The Challenge

Long-reliant on the Magento 1 platform, its end-of-life presented IDEX with both a challenge and an opportunity: find a scalable and secure replacement with the flexibility to meet their B2B eCommerce requirements, while also navigating their larger strategic objective of unifying a growing global portfolio of brands under one seamless experience.

Though distinct in their product offerings, each IDEX portfolio brand shares overlapping audiences, including dealers, Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), Service Centers, and even end customers. From a digital perspective, experiences between these brands were fragmented, each offering different login requirements, purchasing workflows, and visual languages. The myriad of buyers who navigated between the multiple IDEX brands came up against siloed and inconsistent data and buyer journeys, adding friction to their purchase journey. For the IDEX team, managing product catalogs, pricing, and other assets across multiple platforms was complicated and time-consuming.

More than just a platform migration, IDEX needed a digital transformation to bring their brands together, create a better buyer experience, and make it all much simpler to manage on the backend.

The Solution

IDEX partnered with Wasserman Digital to unify their brands on one Ecommerce platform while paying close attention to the unique value that each provides. They selected Adobe Commerce (Magento 2), a modern and scalable ecommerce platform that can accommodate complicated use cases, as the foundation of their future-ready digital transformation.

Single Catalog Powering Multiple Storefronts

The IDEX Fire & Safety architecture uses Adobe Commerce’s multi-site architecture, so each storefront is designed in its respective brand language but connected through shared infrastructure, creating a repeatable purchase journey between them all. For example, navigating HURST Jaws of Life’s website is like Hale’s—only with different logos and colors. Product data is managed in one place, and each product is tagged for its specific storefront. Adobe Commerce’s company-specific cataloging allows for tailored product selection and pricing based on a logged-in user’s company profile type and location for each brand.

Role-Based Buying Experiences

When a buyer is logged in, based on their profile—as a dealer, OEM, or end customer—they will receive content, pricing, and functionality specific to their specific buying role. Dealers and OEMs are able to access enriched product information, downloadable documents, and have the ability to quote or order directly. End customers, meanwhile, are able to browse products, request quotes, find locations, and, where available, purchase select items through a streamlined checkout process.

By managing both content and commerce within Adobe Commerce, IDEX keeps product data, digital assets, and storefront experiences in one place, making it easier to create personalized buyer journeys. Beyond better serving customers and making updates easier to manage, this also opens the door to new marketing touchpoints throughout the customer lifecycle.

Key Features

• Flexible fulfillment platform powered by Quivers to optimize direct sales and order fulfillment by their distributor network or direct from their factory

• Bynder integration to offer searchable product-related documentation within the PDP and dynamic digital asset transformation (DAT) based on the site visitor’s bandwidth to optimize speedy delivery

• Global dealer locator with brand and category filters to find a relevant dealer, along with a contact form powered by Salesforce

• Modern, scalable design utilizing the optimized Hyvä Theme

• Custom security, tax, and compliance tools, including Avalara for tax exemption certificates and JPMC payment processing

• A single sign-on process across all storefronts

• Fire & Safety content hub showcasing trusted resources and case studies for prospective buyers built on an integrated blog solution

• Dealer Rewards Program leveraging the cart flow to recognize strong partners for booked orders.

“We have a unified system for both content and product. A lot of businesses are still maintaining their CMS separately from ecommerce. We’ve got it all in one spot.”

– Sarah Hay, Director, Digital Transformation IDEX Fire & Safety

“For our marketing team, the most exciting thing is the ability to create personalized content: reading the user’s organization type and delivering exactly what they’re looking for.”

– Alyssa Long, Digital Platforms Manager, IDEX Fire & Safety

The Results

With their new Adobe Commerce platform in place, IDEX Fire & Safety has transformed the way it delivers digital experiences, not just externally, but internally as well.

For dealers, OEMs, and end-customers, the improvements were immediately noticeable. The updated design, simplified navigation, and SSO functionality makes it easier for buyers to find the products they want to purchase, access the relevant information about them, and take action: whether that’s requesting a quote, completing a purchase, or finding a dealer that matches their unique specifications. The IDEX team says that the response to these changes has been positive, with Sarah Hay, Director, Digital Transformation Architect, noting, “the design and ease of use? It wows people when they see it.”

For the IDEX team, the new digital commerce experience lays the foundation for a long-term evolution. The ability to manage one common catalog, content system, and customer experience across multiple brands has made it easier for the team to operate: from launching new storefronts, rolling out product updates (and providing all of the necessary documentation along with those updates), and crafting unique content and experience tailored to specific buyer roles and organization types.