W.L. Gore & Associates | Happy Cog® | Web Design & Development

W. L. Gore & Associates (Gore)—best known for their GORE-TEX® apparel—is a materials science company and a global leader in fluoropolymers. Gore products are used in everything from athletic clothing, to surgical implants, and even cables on the Mars Curiosity rover. Their extensive product taxonomy spans over 15 disparate industries.

Gore first partnered with Happy Cog back in October 2014, when we embarked upon the creation of a comprehensive design system for their primary website gore.com. The breadth of Gore’s content, along with their global company structure, required the new design system and content management system (CMS) be as malleable as their ePTFE polymers. Happy Cog worked with Gore to create a flexible, responsive system, unify Gore’s disparate online properties, and humanize their product information.

Such a diverse group of products and industries presented the challenge of maintaining visual continuity. The Happy Cog team created a design system coupled with comprehensive documentation, giving Gore’s sizable team of content caretakers all the tools they’d need to create and maintain visual parity across dissimilar products and industries.

What we did

Research
Content Strategy
Design & Branding
Development
Back-end development
CMS customization
Copywriting
Front-end Development
Implementation support
Internationalization
Stakeholder interviews

Industry

Consumer Brands
Healthcare
Technology
Transportation

The Drupal build is maximally modular to expedite the process of creating new templates and pages.

The true stress test for the flexibility of the design system came after the initial US launch, when the site began rollout worldwide. Every country where Gore had a headquarters (and that country’s respective language) required a digital presence consistent with its counterparts. Due to product availability, regulations, and language differences, the content on these sites wasn’t always a 1:1 translation.

To execute consistent experiences across the additional launches, Happy Cog led a content strategy workshop that was later translated and disseminated to Gore’s German and Asia-Pacific project teams. Happy Cog worked closely with Gore leading up to each international launch to be sure the robust CMS (and associated translation workflow) could accommodate nuanced differences in content across different languages and cultures.

They’ll be up at 7:30am for a phone call with Germany, and then again at 10pm with Japan to make sure we meet our deadlines.
– —Gen Gurczenski, W. L. Gore

Gen Gurczenski talks about what it's like to work with Happy Cog.

Despite team meetings spanning as many as five distant time zones at once, Happy Cog and Gore worked together seamlessly to navigate effective communication between global team members and develop a close, ongoing professional relationship. Our work with Gore continues, based on trust, growing subject matter expertise, and treating their success as if it was our own.