Schwarzkopf Education and Business

Industry: Hairdresses/Hair Products
Description: Custom web solution

Insight

Schwarzkopf is a supplier of hair products to professional hairdressers and retail markets, and with represented in over 30 countries, the Schwarzkopf site needed to be available in 15 different languages. Schwarzkopf wanted to promote their professional brand and range of products by supplying useful information and tools through an online, web-based interface. The challenge was not only to provide impressively presented content through video, Flash and other interactive visual tools, but also to enable all the text on the entire site to be translated (on-the-fly) by the content capturers from the various regions.

Process

White Wall Web created a centralised database with a custom build Content Management System, specifically purposed to handle the multi-lingual requirement. This proved to be challenging as some of the languages (i.e. Mandarin) use non-standard character sets, and it was required for the translated text to automatically reflect in Flash and other technologies, for which it was not designed. White Wall Web built a customised translations system with rules which either defaults back to English (the standard/default language), or hides content in the event of a translation not being present. White Wall Web began with the Education module and added the Business module as a next phase.

Value

Since the inception of the system in 2008, it attracted a steady flow of over 25,000 visitors per month and an increasing subscriber base.

Technology

The solution was built using Ruby on Rails and a MySQL database. The Intellectual Property is held by Schwarzkopf; however White Wall Web retains the right to reuse the translation module and CMS for other clients.

See it

To see ASK Education go to: www.ask-schwarzkopf.com
ASK Business is in private beta and requires permission to be viewed. Should you wish to see the system backend and translation module, please contact us to request a demo.