Challenge

The supplier served contractors, framers and architects across the Nordics, but their old website required a stable connection to browse anything. On construction sites with weak 4G, pages took six seconds or more to load and often timed out. There was no dealer locator, so contractors called the head office to ask where to pick up materials, and sales reps still carried printed catalogs because the digital one could not be relied upon on site.

Solution

We built the catalog as an installable PWA. Product pages, spec sheets and project case studies are cached on first visit, so contractors can browse the full range even in a concrete basement with no signal. A dealer locator uses the device's geolocation to sort the nearest stockists, and a project reference gallery shows real built examples with product lists contractors can price out immediately. The install prompt is shown after the second visit so users can add the catalog to their home screen.

Technical Approach

A service worker caches the app shell and product list on first load; product detail pages are fetched on demand and then cached for offline reuse. A ~250 KB compressed search index is built at build time from the product database and powers sub-50 ms offline search as the user types. Dealer data is served as a static GeoJSON file and sorted client-side by straight-line distance, so no map API call is needed to find the nearest stockist. Updates roll out over the service worker in the background without interrupting the contractor on site.

Results

Within six months, 65% of mobile visits were using the offline catalog on job sites with poor connectivity. Dealer locator usage rose 2.5x as contractors found their own pick-up points instead of calling the office, and mobile PageSpeed improved from 41 to 95. Field sales reps stopped carrying printed catalogs and now use the PWA on their phones in customer meetings.