TAFE Dealer‑Site Programme — Global Roll‑out Case Study
Background
TAFE’s corporate site relaunch in mid‑2024 set a new design benchmark for the brand. Almost immediately, distributors across Europe asked to replicate the look and feel for their own markets. Given TAFE’s reach—80 + export countries and over 1,600 authorised dealers worldwide—a one‑off cloning exercise was neither scalable nor future‑proof.TAFE Deutschland
TAFE therefore commissioned KRDS to create a “website factory”: a single, centrally managed platform capable of generating fully localised, brand‑compliant sites for every distributor—starting with 17 early adopters in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and other European territories.
The Brief
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Offer each distributor a high‑performance website that mirrors the new tafe‑tractors.com aesthetic.
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Launch every site inside four weeks, with minimal local technical resource.
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Preserve strict brand governance while giving dealers freedom to add regional offers, regulatory pages and language variants.
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Keep ongoing maintenance light so KRDS and TAFE can focus on enhancements, not firefighting.
Our Approach
| Focus Area | What We Delivered |
|---|---|
| Design System | A modular UI kit—hero carousel, product gallery, finance calculator, dealer‑locator, blog—allowing distributors to build pages via drag‑and‑drop without breaking brand rules. |
| Multi‑tenant Architecture | Next.js front‑end for server‑side rendering and excellent Core Web Vitals; Storyblok headless CMS for visual editing and workflow‑based localisation; GraphQL layer for a centralised product catalogue with market‑specific specs and prices. |
| Deployment Pipeline | One‑click script spins up a Git repository, provisions a CMS space, injects locale files and pushes to Vercel—achieving sub‑30‑minute technical setup. |
| Localisation & Compliance | Auto‑translation pipeline (DeepL API) produced first‑pass copy in 24 h, then routed to distributors for in‑context review. Country‑specific legal pages (Impressum, Datenschutzerklärung, CE conformity, etc.) were templated and surfaced automatically based on locale. |
| Training & Support | Two‑hour remote CMS workshop for each dealer; live Looker Studio dashboards for traffic, form enquiries and Lighthouse performance scores; automated alerts when any page fell below a 90/100 performance threshold. |
The Outcome (first six months, 17 European dealer sites)
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Launch velocity – Average 18 days from brief to go‑live (fastest: 12 days), well inside the four‑week target.
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Site performance – Median Largest Contentful Paint 1.4 s on 3G and Lighthouse 94/100; bounce rate on mobile fell by 27 percentage points compared with previous dealer microsites.
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Lead generation – Contact‑form and “Request a demo” submissions rose 38 % versus the dealers’ old landing pages and Facebook lead ads, according to GA4.
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Organic visibility – Local‑language SEO and structured data drove a 71 % lift in organic sessions across the cohort.
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Dealer autonomy – Most distributors mastered the CMS in under two hours; they now publish promotions and language tweaks same‑day, without HQ intervention.
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Operational overhead – An average of three support tickets per month across all live sites keeps maintenance lean and predictable.
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Brand consistency – A design‑audit sweep in February 2025 found 100 % compliance with TAFE’s global style guide—logos, typefaces, colour palette and imagery were uniform from tafe.de to tafe.es.
Why It Matters
The dealer‑site programme converts TAFE’s global brand guidelines into living, local experiences that load fast, rank well and—most importantly—generate more tractor enquiries. With a repeatable blueprint now proven across Europe, TAFE can extend the same model to Africa, Latin America and South‑East Asia, confident that each new site will launch quickly, perform brilliantly and tell a consistent brand story.
