The existing website was running on a version of WordPress that was becoming a structural risk. It was slow to load, and a pain for the Shire Beds team to update which made it dependent on developer support for even the most basic amends, it was falling over regularly and holding a brilliant brand back.
In B2B manufacturing marketing terms, your website is your showroom floor, your trade catalogue, and your first sales conversation, all at once. Shire's wasn't doing any of those jobs well.
We were brought in to fix that. And we didn't stop at the website.
When you're working with a multi-generational manufacturing business, the worst thing you can do is arrive with a wrecking ball. Brand equity takes decades to build. Our job was to sharpen what was already there, not replace it.
We took the existing Shire brand and put it through a forensic refresh. Logo options were developed that modernised the shield device while retaining its authority, the mark of a maker, not a retailer. The colour palette was refined and formalised: the deep crimson primary that Shire is known for sat alongside a complementary navy and a carefully chosen secondary palette that could flex across digital, print and trade comms without losing coherence.
Typography was overhauled too, Goudy Bold for headings, Quicksand for body copy, giving the brand the warmth and legibility it needed across both desktop and mobile, while staying firmly on-brand for a premium British manufacturer.
The result: a brand system that felt unmistakably like Shire, but looked like a business ready for the next 25 years.
This wasn't a consumer redesign. Yes, Shire sells to the public, but the real commercial prize is the trade and contract audience, bed retailers, hotel procurement teams, care home operators, and hospitality groups looking for a reliable British manufacturing partner. That audience needed to be spoken to directly, and the site structure had to serve them without alienating the domestic buyer.
We architected the site accordingly. Clear navigation. Dedicated manufacturing credentials. Collection pages built to inform, not just impress. A sustainability section that told the full story, eco-conscious product development, ethical sourcing, sustainable manufacturing, efficient logistics because in the modern era, that story matters to buyers.
The contact experience was rethought from the ground up. No more generic forms buried in footers. A proper enquiry journey, clear calls to action, and the kind of friction-free experience that makes a trade buyer pick up the phone rather than move on to the next manufacturer.
The user experience was rethought from the ground up. The old site buried enquiry forms and made trade buyers work for information that should have been front and centre.
We redesigned the entire user journey with a clear UX hierarchy, separating the trade and contract audiences, so each user lands in the right place without having to figure it out themselves.
The enquiry journey was rebuilt with purpose, simple, clean, and structured to give Shire's team the information they actually need from a first contact, rather than a vague "get in touch" that generates noise.
On mobile, the experience was given the same attention as desktop, because in B2B manufacturing, a procurement manager researching suppliers at 10pm on their phone is a real scenario, not an edge case. Every touchpoint, every label, every CTA was considered for the trade buyer first.
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We set up GA4 from scratch and made sure it was actually doing something useful. Every contact form across the site is tracked as a conversion event, not just firing into a void, but recorded, attributed and reportable. We built bespoke thank you pages for each form type, which does two things: it gives the user a proper confirmation that their enquiry has landed, and it gives Shire's team clean, reliable conversion data they can actually act on.
No more guessing whether the website is generating leads. No more digging through raw session data trying to work out where enquiries are coming from. The reporting setup that came out of this project tells a clear story, traffic sources, conversion paths, form completions and it updates itself.
This comes as standard on every website project we deliver at HB2B. A site that can't tell you what it's doing isn't finished.
A website that looks like the brand deserves. A platform the team can own. And a digital presence that actually represents what Shire Beds is: a serious, award-winning British manufacturer with the credentials, the collections and the capacity to be the brand behind some of the best beds in the market.
The new site performs better on every metric that matters for manufacturing website SEO, page speed, mobile optimisation, structured navigation, and the kind of clear, credible content that search engines and trade buyers both trust.
Working with the Halston B2B team was a pleasure from start to finish.
They took the time to understand what Shire Beds is really about, not just our products, but our history, our values, and the people behind them.
The new website is everything we needed: beautiful, easy to manage, and finally doing justice to the brand we’ve spent 25 years building.
Fara Butt
Director, Shire Beds
Whether you need to refresh your branding or undergo a full redevelopment, find out what’s involved by speaking with our team!
