Tikkurila – From fragmented to seamless digital presence

Tikkurila partnered with Wunder to enhance its web infrastructure, resulting in optimized hosting, upgraded Drupal, and improved performance and user experience. This streamlined web presence enables exceptional customer experiences and supports business growth.

3 mobile screenshots of Tikkurila website

Briefly

Tikkurila's collaboration with Wunder resulted in a transformative shift from a fragmented to a seamless digital presence. By enhancing Tikkurila's web infrastructure, including optimized hosting, upgraded Drupal, and improved performance, Wunder enabled exceptional client and user experiences, fostering business growth.

Tikkurila logo

About this work

What is PPG Tikkurila?

PPG Tikkurila is a Nordic paint company whose products are manufactured of carefully chosen raw materials that meet the highest quality standards. Tikkurila’s vision is to create surfaces that make a difference. Tikkurila has three core premium brands in decorative paints: Tikkurila, Alcro, and Beckers. In addition, there are several local painting brands in European markets: Vivacolor, Jedynka, and Polifarb.

Objectives

When PPG Tikkurila began searching for a new digital partner, they highlighted their wish to shift the focus from technical projects to building a customer-centric experience. They were looking for a partner that shared their vision and could provide a business-oriented development process, with a clear emphasis on achieving measurable business benefits and being truly focused on meeting end-users’ needs.

Top-quality painting brands need to be communicated in a highly visual and inspirational manner. That demanded professional digital services designing skills, an understanding of the optimal user journeys, UX/UI prototyping for particular services, or further planning of the technical architecture. At the beginning of the new partnership, there was a need to tackle a stretched backlog of development needs.

"The collaboration is open and pleasant. Wunder understood our situation and we got along from the very beginning. It is a pleasure to work with such professionals – we seem to have a common “run it like you own it” mentality."

Olli Ruhanen, Digital Development Manager, PPG Tikkurila

The background

The roots of Tikkurila company date back to 1862 when Tikkurila was founded. What started out as a small Finnish oil press, then grew over time into a leading Nordic paint company. PPG Tikkurila was born in 2021 when the Tikkurila company merged with PPG Corporation.

PPG Corporation is a global supplier of paints and coatings. PPG serves customers with 50,000 employees and operations in 75 countries. PPG is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Headquarters in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, and is a Fortune 500 company.

Digital services have several user segments (consumer households, professional painters, construction industry) and several product brands (Alcro, Beckers, Tikkurila, Vivacolor, Jedynka, Polifarb) and several sales areas around Europe (Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Kazakhstan).

Blue painted kids room with a desk

The challenge

PPG Tikkurila faced a challenge with its digital landscape spread across multiple websites for different brands and languages. They recognized the need for a partner to help take their online services to the next level from both a business and end-user perspective.

Wunder was selected as a partner to address this challenge and began working closely with PPG Tikkurila in 2022. The partnership involves active digital development and creative design that reflects the company’s brand values and helps drive business growth. The goal is to provide PPG Tikkurila’s customer segments with an exceptional online experience, bringing together their various brands and language versions into a seamless and intuitive user experience.

On top of that, the multi-site situation had caused gaps in security and slowed down further development of the services. Therefore it was important for the new partner to have strong knowledge of infrastructure architecture to administer all PPG Tikkurila brand websites.

"I was surprised about the amount of fixing and refactoring we needed to do. Thanks to Wunder's expertise, when it comes to maintenance, support, and overall development of our sites, I feel we are in good hands now."

Olli Ruhanen, Digital Development Manager, PPG Tikkurila

The solution

Tikkurila partnered with Wunder to enhance its web infrastructure. The process began with an audit of the existing web services, identifying areas for improvement.

Tikkurila has been utilizing Microsoft Azure’s cloud platform for several years. Wunder proposed implementing its Silta Continuous Delivery Platform to optimize the development and deployment workflows. By integrating Wunder’s SiltaOpens in a new tab with Tikkurila’s existing Microsoft Azure infrastructure, the company experienced improvements in security, efficiency, and cost reduction within its cloud operations.

Unifying the codebases of the PPG Tikkurila brand sites, core updates and Drupal 8 to 9 migration improved features and security. Code refactoring optimized performance and maintainability.

Desktop screenshot of Tikkurila website

The results

Thanks to this collaboration, PPG Tikkurila has undergone a remarkable transformation of its web services infrastructure. Now, they have a top-notch setup, benefiting from optimized hosting, up-to-date Drupal, refined code, and unified architecture. This has resulted in improved performance, enhanced security, and increased scalability.

Furthermore, our team at Wunder has developed data export functionality from Tikkurila’s product management system (PIM), enhancing integration and streamlining processes. To ensure consistency, a unified language setup has been implemented across the various country-specific websites.

The collaboration between Tikkurila and Wunder has led to better communication between the client, designers and developers, thus developing transparency and resulting in improved customer experience. The partnership also has addressed previous challenges, such as the lack of consultation on end-user experience and roadmap building.

"The three reasons that convinced us to choose Wunder: Firstly, they presented the most credible plan to take over and update PPG Tikkurila brand sites. Secondly, our past projects with Wunder were followed through without hiccups. Thirdly, Wunder is an international Drupal partner that supports our business development and understands the importance of better end-user experience."

Olli Ruhanen, Digital Development Manager, PPG Tikkurila

Now we are ready to nourish our warm cooperation and continue our work with PPG Tikkurila on the next challenges and development topics.

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