Consumer Health · India · Enterprise E-Commerce
Reckitt is one of the world’s largest consumer health and hygiene companies, with brands including Dettol, Lizol, Air Wick, and Veet recognised by virtually every household in India. But despite that brand equity, their India e-commerce presence told a very different story.
Each of the 8 sub-brands had developed its digital presence independently, managed by separate teams with no shared infrastructure. Some brands had standalone sites that hadn’t been updated in years. Others had landing pages that couldn’t take transactions. None had a consistent approach to product discovery, checkout, or customer account management. The fragmentation meant that a customer who bought Dettol online was having a completely different experience from one buying Air Wick — and both experiences were below the standard expected of a global FMCG leader.
The SEO consequences were significant. Brands were effectively competing against each other for the same category keywords. There was no cross-brand merchandising — a customer buying one Reckitt product had no pathway to discover other brands in the portfolio. And the absence of a unified customer account meant zero ability to build cross-brand loyalty or lifetime value intelligence.
The internal challenge was equally complex: 8 marketing teams, each with strong opinions about their brand’s identity, needed to be unified onto a single platform without any brand feeling like it had been subordinated to the others.
The central design challenge was this: how do you build one platform that feels like eight distinct brand experiences? The wrong answer — which we see frequently in multi-brand builds — is a single design system applied uniformly across all brands. Dettol and Air Wick do not belong in the same visual language. Their customers, their tone, their product photography, and their purchase motivations are entirely different.
We designed a headless e-commerce architecture with a shared backend and brand-specific front-end design systems. The shared backend handled the elements where consistency is a genuine advantage: a single product information management (PIM) system for all 1,200+ SKUs, a unified customer account and authentication layer, a shared payment gateway with consistent checkout flows, and a central order management and fulfilment interface. The team managing the platform goes to one place to do everything that doesn’t need to be brand-specific.
The brand-specific front ends gave each sub-brand its own design language: independent colour palette, typography, tone of voice in product copy, photography treatment, and navigation hierarchy. Critically, each brand received its own independent URL structure — ensuring that Dettol.in, AirWick.in, and Veet.in could each build independent SEO authority without cross-contaminating each other’s keyword rankings.
The project ran across four parallel workstreams managed by a dedicated HatchHope team of six: platform architecture and backend development, front-end design systems (one per brand), PIM migration (moving legacy product data from 8 disparate sources into a single structured catalogue), and QA and stakeholder management across the 8 brand teams.
The stakeholder management piece was as complex as the technical work. Each brand team had a point of view on their visual identity, their product hierarchy, and their SEO priorities. We built a structured review process — brand alignment workshops in week 2, design reviews in weeks 5 and 8, and UAT sessions with each brand team independently before the consolidated launch — that kept all 8 stakeholders aligned without any single team blocking progress on the others.
The PIM migration required building custom data pipelines to ingest product data from Excel files, legacy CMS exports, and manually-maintained Google Sheets across 8 brands, standardise it against a common schema, and load it into the new system with all relationships, variant structures, and cross-brand references intact. This is the work that usually gets underestimated in multi-brand builds and is the most common source of launch delays. We built a 3-week buffer for it; we used 2 of those weeks.
The Reckitt engagement is a case study in a problem that is more common than it appears: large organisations with strong brand portfolios whose digital infrastructure has grown by accretion rather than design. Each brand made reasonable decisions in isolation; the cumulative result is a collection of disconnected experiences that collectively underperform what a unified platform could achieve.
If your business operates multiple brands, product lines, or regional variations on a common platform — or if you are trying to bring fragmented digital presences under a unified infrastructure — the architecture decisions made at the start of that project determine everything that comes after. HatchHope has designed and built these platforms for enterprise clients across India, UAE, and the UK.
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