Bendix Moto website

Bendix is the market leader in automotive brake solutions in Australia, boasting a 60+ year history of local manufacturing. With a strong foundation in automotive products and a loyal customer base, Bendix was ready to launch a new venture into motorcycle brake parts.

Ahead of the launch of their new brand, Bendix engaged Tundra to design and develop a website experience that would speak to this new market and position Bendix as the supplier of choice.

Breaking into new markets

Launching a new brand is an exciting but complex process, with a lot of factors to consider. Bendix had already put considerable thought into the strategy and positioning of their Moto brand, including a detailed understanding of their target audience and the way they currently engage with part suppliers. We ran a workshop with key stakeholders at Bendix to better understand their strategy for the Moto brand, and to gain a full picture of the role the website would need to play in supporting the launch and growth of the brand.

Key to this understanding was the direct relationship between Bendix and motorcycle riders. Unlike car owners, who are typically reliant on mechanics to purchase and fit brake parts, motorcycle owners frequently perform their own repairs. This direct customer relationship, combined with the social and community focus of motorcycle riding, necessitated a content and lifestyle-led website strategy that would seek to establish Bendix as a trusted source of information for the moto community.

A lifestyle and community-focused site structure

With a clear picture of the website requirements with audience needs and pain points in mind, we set about developing an Information Architecture that would support both product and content discovery through clear, structured journeys.

Given that the site would have a community focus, we designed a series of ‘riding style’ journeys, which would allow users to easily locate the content and products most suited to the types of bikes they ride.

The site’s navigation is broad and shallow to allow users direct access to key topics and journeys, and to allow for easier segmentation between riding styles. The site’s content design also allows for cross-linking between site sections through the use of bespoke catalogue search and card grid components to provide entry into different content journeys.

Presenting product information with clarity

Given that the Moto website would be the primary point of sale for motorcycle parts, it was important that the user journeys support and prioritise product discovery. The ‘Part finder’ catalogue presents a simple way of searching for motorcycle products, using an integration with Bendix’s PARtsDB product catalogue to surface relevant parts based on the user’s selections. The search widget can be accessed across multiple pages of the site, including from within the ‘riding style’ user journeys, to create links between the community-focused content and the products it relates to.

With many motorbike riders performing their own repairs, we needed product pages to be simple and easy to comprehend. The page design prioritises key product specifications, such as the part number, size, and imagery, with more detailed information made available through accordions. The purchase process is made easy through a clear and clean eCommerce design, which mimics that of the Bendix website, leveraging familiar cart and checkout design patterns to quickly onboard users to the experience.

A fresh, bold design

To tie in with the community focus of the site, we created a UI design that prioritised bold, aspirational action photography. We worked with Bendix’s brand agency to create a brief for the photography requirements, and also worked collaboratively to incorporate the new Bendix Moto logo and brand motif into our site designs.

Bendix wanted the Moto brand to be visually distinct, while still retaining a clear link to its parent Bendix brand. To achieve this, we used a monochrome colour palette of charcoal and white to give the Moto site a prestigious, luxurious feel and place emphasis on the site photography. To tie in with the parent brand, Bendix’s primary blue colour was woven into the site in understated, strategic ways, such as hover states and the secondary navigation bar.

To save on development costs and create efficiency for Bendix content authors, we built the Moto website in the same Craft instance as Bendix’s existing website. This, combined with Craft’s ‘globals’ and ‘entries’ structure, allowed us to pick and choose which parts of the existing site we wanted to carry over to the new Moto site, whilst also saving time on backend setup. We also utilised the same PARtsDB and Algolia integrations to power parts and site search.

Developing both sites in the same Craft instance also allows Bendix to create their corporate and brand information in one location and populate it across both sites—reducing the administrative overhead of updating policies in multiple places.

To support Bendix Moto’s presence in both Australia and New Zealand, we used Craft’s site group feature for localisation. This allows the Bendix team to populate content across both the Australian and New Zealand Moto sites, providing further efficiencies in content production.

The site design is component-driven, with each page being composed of reusable components rather than templates or hard coded fields. This gives Bendix content authors increased flexibility in how they compose their content, and reduces Bendix’s reliance on technical development to achieve their content goals.

The site includes subtle animation across text styles and images, which was achieved using CSS to keep the code as lightweight as possible. To keep the site up-to-date and prevent the code from ageing prematurely, we used Javascript as the main development language. This allowed us to keep development light and streamlined, and also future-proofed the site to ensure it could be easily amended and added to over time as new features and business requirements arise.

With a bold, striking design and clear, content-driven user journeys, the Bendix Moto site provides a strong launchpad for the new brand, with plenty of scope to grow as the brand evolves over time.