Building a growing portfolio

Home Franchise Concepts (HFC) is a powerful force in the Home Services Industry with over 1400 individual franchises.

With the goal of creating a new budgetblinds.com that was highly scalable and re-usable, HFC was seeking a solution that could be later adopted by other brands in the HFC portfolio. The site needed to be modern, easy to use, and robust, offering a means of adhering to national brand guidelines while allowing local franchises to customize their local information.

For these reasons, Episerver was chosen to support a modern, inviting, and highly functional budgetblinds.com.

Drawing out the objectives

• Redeploy both the technology and the brand image for HFC’s flagship brand, Budget Blinds
• Deliver a modern, easy to use, and robust experience - offering a means of adhering to national brand guidelines while allowing local franchises to customize their local information
• HFC required a platform that offered ease of use for their marketing teams as well as personalization and potential for commerce opportunities at scale.

Turning a blind eye to on prem

With the help of partner, Verndale, HFC transformed its aging Ektron installation into a modern, inviting, and highly functional budgetblinds.com.

A hallmark of the development is the ability to default national brand content for each localized site – which can now be tailored to meet each franchisee’s local market. Franchisees have easy access to branded content and can adapt and modify local franchise information as needed. This provides franchisees a near turnkey approach to deploying their own sites. Using items like static and smart replacement tokens to load localized content easily, we were able to deliver a platform that dynamically adapts to changes using smart navigation, dynamic sitemaps, and robots to integrate with CMS. In addition, we integrated the client’s internal tracking process with customized Episerver forms.

Verndale and HFC worked in a co-development fashion using Optimizely to successfully deploy a more modern design and user experience. The updated experience provided flexibility for franchisees to utilize the power of a robust content management solution.

With Optimizely, the website will empower both corporate marketing and IT to manage a single robust platform while giving franchisees the opportunity to personalize and sell to their target markets.

Now, HFC has a very solid, scalable platform to accommodate additional properties can be folded into the platform with ease.

Budgetblinds has over 1,000 individual franchises which creates complexities around offering a consistent experience but allowing enough room to offer personalized experiences for different expectations across the United States. HFC is now primed to make a big impact as they continue to push the envelope on this balance of consistency and personalization.

Home Franchise Concepts has the answer, with Budget Blinds, Tailored Living and Concrete Craft.

The franchise experts of Home Franchise Concepts (HFC) are dedicated to helping people go into business for themselves— and to help them grow their home-based franchise business to be as successful as possible. We want you to start strong and stay strong so we give you all the resources, world-class support and marketing savvy you need.