Whether you’re entering a code into the keyless door lock at your weekend rental or swiping your employee nametag to enter the office, dormakaba products are everywhere, in every secure entry or access point that matters — and when they work seamlessly, you hardly notice them.
Headquartered in Rümlang, Switzerland, dormakaba has been delivering cutting-edge solutions to the access control industry since 1862, building a reputation for products that are innovative, functional, and aesthetically appealing.
Once separate brands, Dorma and Kaba combined their 150+ years of experience in 2015 to offer customers even safer, more secure, and sustainable security options. dormakaba has since acquired many companies along their growth journey, each with their own products and style. With more than 15,000 employees working in 130 countries, the distributed workforce faced the challenge of creating a consistent and compelling brand presence.
dormakaba’s website team was tasked with finding a way to centralize web development workflows, while giving design and marketing the creative autonomy to properly promote their products.
Streamlining independent workflows to create a unified brand
Webflow empowers us to centralize our global, digital brand and ensure the look and feel of our marketing sites stay consistent.
— Jose Juan ‘JJ’ López, Global Lead of Digital Marketing, dormakaba
At the heart of dormakaba are their world-class products — and behind each one is a dedicated, distributed marketing team. Historically, to create conversion-driving landing pages, each team would work with their local agencies, who would then present the campaign microsite in WordPress or a custom-built CMS. This resulted in pages that felt disconnected from the overall dormakaba brand. It was expensive, too: Each campaign microsite with its own CMS cost around a middle five-digit number, which meant they were spending upwards of half a million dollars on web projects annually, leaving little budget to promote the actual pages.
The microsites, each built from scratch by different teams, led to inconsistent interpretations of design guidelines and were often hosted separately. Implementing front-end changes or adjustments required a developer, limiting creativity and customization. dormakaba’s marketing team needed flexibility to quickly create landing pages and microsites with elevated designs, and the ability to make changes easily and quickly.
Once the team started digging into the space, it was clear that Webflow Enterprise was the solution. “Webflow is especially appealing for nontechnical marketers” says dormakaba’s Global Lead of Digital Marketing JJ López. “Webflow doesn’t put any limits on our creativity.”
With Webflow, the breakpoints among devices and animations are straightforward, and the ease of creating new fields in CMS collections and surfacing them dynamically on sites is seamless. Managing the front end was complex with other platforms. “In contrast, with Webflow, we simply click a button to deploy to production or staging,” says JJ. Not only intuitive to use, Webflow is dynamic enough to give dormakaba the design functionality and freedom to support their company’s growth. “Webflow is the most future-proof option.”
Bringing the brand to life 4 times faster
Webflow allows us to move faster by removing barriers to our creativity and campaigns. We’re significantly reducing development costs because we have all the components already built in Webflow.
— Jose Juan ‘JJ’ López, Global Lead of Digital Marketing, dormakaba
To convert prospective customers, dormakaba has created numerous local landing pages and microsites. One example is the apple wallet key for hotels: a landing page for the US Market, highlighting how their product empowers more enjoyable, seamless stays at hotels. Their latest project is the digital edition of dormakaba’s Global Employee Magazine, “CONNECT”, where they share human stories that take place in dormakaba locations all around the world. “For this project, we created structured content to increase engagement, enhanced the experience with mobile-first interactions, and seamlessly translated the microsite into seven languages,” says JJ.
To create a more engaging user experience for the CONNECT site, the team integrated video animations throughout the site with GSAP. “Interactivity and animations are a must to make websites more engaging,” says JJ. “We chose to use GSAP because we wanted to deliver a smooth scrolling experience.” Instead of simple static images or screenshots as the thumbnail, a slow-motion preview begins every time a user’s cursor hovers over a video. This nudges the visitor to play the video in full screen and immerse themselves in the digital experience.
The dormakaba team uses Webflow components to maintain a consistent, efficient, and scalable design workflow with customizable blocks. They can now easily reuse those blocks across their site, and make changes in a single place that replicates across their sites. “Adding new categories or new content types is amazingly simple and fast. We can improve the CMS data structure, adding new fields in minutes, whereas the process with traditional CMS platforms would have been 10x more work,” says JJ. They can also publish just one item at a time with single-item publishing. “Once the information is in the CMS, you simply click the one item to add it, speeding up the workflow without republishing the entire site.”
Before, they depended on other teams to build sites, but now they can create their own landing pages with fully functional, brand-compliant components. “Our marketing team loves the page-building functionality: It unlocks the full power of Webflow faster than ever,” says JJ. With advanced collaboration tools as a foundation, it only took about two months to create the CONNECT website—four times faster than previous site builds. “Webflow allowed us to bring the brand to life quickly, while letting us push the creative boundaries.”
Scaling dormakaba’s global brand with Webflow Localization
We previously relied on third party localization and translation was a painful, tedious process. Now, with Webflow, we have the benefit of having localization natively integrated in our web platform. It’s a much simpler and smoother process, empowering our marketing team to move faster.
— Jose Juan ‘JJ’ López, Global Lead of Digital Marketing, dormakaba
As a global company, localization is a key focus. Before Webflow, dormakaba used a third-party tool with a slow and cumbersome process—taking 3-4 extra weeks to publish and review localized content. Now, with Webflow Localization, they publish all language versions simultaneously–cutting the timeline in half.
“The localization of CMS items in Webflow is mind-blowing,” says JJ. dormakaba is translating content into eight languages in-house, drastically reducing the need for costly translation agencies. “With just a click, you can switch a blog or landing page to another language, translate fields at once or individually, then proofread and publish.” Each page is tailored to local markets with translated text, culturally relevant images, and videos. Local teams use edit mode for real-time updates, while the ability to hide sections by location increases flexibility.
dormakaba sees Webflow as a key partner in their growth, enabling them to scale landing pages—product pages, company news, and digital user journeys—while integrating seamlessly with tools like GSAP for dynamic content. They also value their tight-knit partnership with the Webflow Enterprise team. “Having a dedicated team we can strategize with makes such a difference,” says JJ. “With ongoing communication, the team really understands our needs and takes action. Webflow eliminates a lot of internal friction and helps us enable our global teams.”
These innovations are not just driving efficiency but positioning dormakaba for sustained growth as they continue to build a more dynamic, user-friendly digital experience. “With Webflow, we can focus on feature development and bring a cohesive, consistent brand to life with fewer resources,” says JJ.
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