Sector(s)
Project Team
- SparkFabrik: Strategy, UX/UI and Design System, Development, DevOps, Unified Support
- Zambon: Digital department (Zambon Digital), brand managers; creative agencies as co-suppliers
Zambon is a chemical-pharmaceutical multinational founded in Vicenza in 1906, spanning multiple brands and geographies. Its product websites had grown up piecemeal: many sites run by individual countries, on different technologies, often with little or no room to intervene. Costs were unpredictable and brand experience inconsistent.
After rebuilding Zambon's corporate and Zambon Pharma country sites, the group wanted the same approach for its product sites: a central hub to produce and manage brand websites at global scale.
SparkFabrik generalized the corporate Design System into a reusable component catalog and customized Drupal into a cloud-native platform to generate and operate these sites.
About the project
Goals
Create a central hub to produce and manage Zambon product websites globally, replacing a fragmented estate of country-managed sites with one shared platform, optimizing speed to market, cost control, quality, and asset reuse, while evolving the corporate Design System into a reusable catalog.
Challenge
Product sites had been built independently per country, on mixed technologies, with inconsistent brand experience, unpredictable costs, and often no way to make changes. The group needed a common platform for creating new sites, predictable development and maintenance costs, brand uniformity, a single hosting infrastructure, and a design method reproducible enough to make delivery timelines and budgets predictable. The infrastructure also had to serve every geography, including China, where Western cloud response times are otherwise unworkable.
Solution
SparkFabrik generalized the corporate Design System into a catalog of modular components and customized Drupal into a cloud-native platform, internally named Firestarter, to generate and run product sites from it. Two leading brands launched as pilots.
Highlights:
- Site-factory model: modular development techniques were systematized as a default feature, so new sites are assembled from existing components (with room to add new ones), producing sites that are technically similar but visually distinct per brand
- Shared, living Design System: a continuously evolving digital catalog that brand managers and creative agencies can consult and build against
- Multi-cloud, cloud-native operations: Google Cloud Platform for the West and Alibaba Cloud for the East, fronted by global CDNs, for resilience and fast response times worldwide, including China
- High availability: production clusters with auto-scaling and auto-healing sustain uptime through deployments and maintenance
- Unified support: one team maintains the whole stack, so updates propagate to all sites without cross-vendor coordination
Outcome
- One shared platform and a single supplier for delivery, with Zambon retaining control of its digital assets
- Predictable, fixed production and maintenance costs in place of variable, uncertain ones
- A standard delivery workflow and reproducible design method, improving brand consistency and speed to market
- A single, centrally governed source of truth for architecture and CMS
- Marketers freed to focus on communication, delegating content, hosting, and maintenance to the platform
Through this shared platform we are able to guarantee to all of our local affiliates a better homogeneity and coherence in the digital experience design of our product communication, a remarkable decrease of production costs and times, and process clarity on a global scale.
Laura Zordan, Digital Transformation & Service Design Strategist, Zambon SPA
Why Drupal was chosen
The group needed a single content platform able to power many product sites that look distinct per brand yet stay technically uniform, all under central control. Drupal was customized into that platform. It won on:
- Platform, not a website: one Drupal-based backbone provisions many brand sites, each assembled from a shared library of reusable components rather than rebuilt from zero
- Structured, component-based content modeling: editors and agencies compose pages from a catalog of modular components, extendable per brand while the platform stays consistent
- Editorial and brand autonomy with central governance: local affiliates and creative agencies work within shared guidelines, so sites stay on-brand while being independently editable
- Open source, no per-seat licensing: sites and users scale across brands and countries without license cost, backed by a large community
- API-friendly and extensible: integrates cleanly with the group's cloud operations and can host legacy or third-party sites when needed
- Proven at multinational scale: already trusted for Zambon's corporate and country sites
Technical Specifications
Drupal's component-based content modeling turned the design system into a working catalog of reusable page components, so each brand site is assembled from shared building blocks, technically uniform, visually distinct. Configuration and multi-environment tooling made the build reproducible enough to standardize delivery and make costs predictable. Standards-based APIs let the platform integrate with the group's multi-cloud operations and optionally host third-party sites. Being open source with no per-seat licensing, it scales across brands, countries, and editors without license cost.
