D2C Ecommerce for Tarkett
The problem
Tarkett is a global flooring brand with 140 years of B2B heritage and a €3.3 billion annual turnover. The opportunity: shift first-line inspiration, sample sales and smaller orders to a direct-to-consumer channel, offloading customer support overhead while opening a new revenue stream.
Flooring is one of the largest and least frequent purchases most people make, high cost, physically consequential, essentially irreversible. Customers think in rooms and looks. Product is sold in odd square metre packages. The actual purchase journey spans weeks or even months, a realisation phase where vision and budget take shape, research into materials and product ecology, decisions between DIY and professional installation, and the logistics of planning deliveries of hundreds of kilos of product.
A website handling that journey has to replace the confidence of a handshake. Missing features considered standard elsewhere, a slow or convoluted path to purchase, or product information that arrives too late aren't just friction, they're reasons to leave for a physical store.
The real problem
From first brief to first transaction is a long road — coordinating specialist resources across Europe, managing strict technical integrations with systems not originally built with ecommerce in mind, on schedules not built around the project's. The discovery had to be real, because both sides needed to understand what they were committing to before the work started.
What I did
Conducted client stakeholder management and third-party partner research across the full engagement period. Identifying the right specialist tools and integrations, and finding opportunities to scale ambition in ways expanding both Vaimo's delivery and Tarkett's customer experience beyond the original brief. Researched and tested how users across different levels of purchase readiness and maturity navigated flooring decisions online. Mapped the information architecture to serve the full range, from early inspiration through to completed transaction, with configuration complexity built into the journey rather than surfaced as warnings at the point of no return.
What changed
Tarkett moved from a site that supplied inspiration and technical information to one that could complete the full purchase journey pre-sale, during and post. A platform built not just for launch but with a five year roadmap for continued development, localisation and online-market expansion.
My role
I was the Lead designer for Vaimo. Responsible for shaping what was possible on both sides of the engagement simultaneously, expanding client ambition where the opportunity existed, constraining it where reality required, and keeping technical delivery and customer vision moving in the same direction. Covered discovery, stakeholder management, third-party research, user research, information architecture and design.
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