Lactae Hevea Case Study: B2B Digital Transformation

From Artisan Legacy to Modern B2B Platform: A Three-Phase Digital and Brand Transformation

A Partnership with ACV Consulting

Published: October 16th, 2026.

This Lactae Hevea case study explores how ACV Consulting supported B2B digital transformation for a French heritage manufacturer through brand strategy, a comprehensive digital assessment, and a Shopify website redesign. The three-phase engagement modernized the company's digital presence while preserving the craftsmanship and brand identity that have defined it for more than fifty years.

 

The Challenge

Lactae Hevea has spent more than fifty years doing something rare: manufacturing premium natural rubber shoe soles by hand, in France, for the world's most discerning footwear designers. The brand holds France's Entreprise du Patrimoine Vivant designation - the Living Heritage Company label - and counts some of the finest names in luxury footwear among its partners. The craft is exceptional. The reputation, earned over decades, is real.

But the digital infrastructure behind the brand had not kept pace with either its heritage or its ambitions. The company's website ran on a legacy PHP/Apache framework with no content management system - a technical foundation that made updates difficult, limited B2B functionality, and created a first impression that understated the brand's quality for potential wholesale partners discovering it online for the first time. Email outreach lacked modern flows. SEO performance against competitors left meaningful opportunities on the table.

When your product is held to the standard of fine craftsmanship, every customer touchpoint has to reflect that standard - including the ones that happen before anyone picks up the phone.

The challenge was not simply technical. Before any digital work could be done well, there was a more foundational question to answer: did the brand's own articulation of who it is, who it serves, and what makes it different match the clarity and precision of its physical product? Lactae Hevea needed a partner who could work across brand strategy and digital execution simultaneously - bringing both together through a B2B digital transformation that recognized the two were not separate problems.

 

The Engagement: A Three-Phase B2B Digital Transformation

ACV Consulting approached the engagement in three sequential phases, each building directly on the work that preceded it. The logic was deliberate: getting the brand right before auditing the digital presence, and completing the audit before designing the new platform. Strategy without data produces guesswork. Design without strategy produces templates. The sequencing ensured each phase was informed by the one before it.

 

Phase 1: Brand DNA Assessment

The engagement began with a Brand DNA Assessment. ACV reviewed existing brand guidelines, visual assets, and positioning materials before facilitating a two-hour workshop with key members of the Lactae Hevea brand team. The workshop examined brand personality, purpose, core values, reasons to believe, consumer profiles, points of parity, and points of difference - the full architecture of a brand DNA framework. The findings were captured in a refined brand pyramid and a set of consumer profiles that would anchor the work to follow.

 

Phase 2: Comprehensive Assessment

With a documented brand foundation in place, Phase 2 focused on a comprehensive Digital Assessment. ACV's digital team conducted a systematic review of the brand's website against competitive benchmarks - examining site speed, tech stack, traffic, conversion performance, UX and UI, SEO positioning, and Google Analytics data. Email B2B outreach flows were evaluated alongside the website, and competitive insights identified the experience standards that top US competitors had established. The assessment concluded with a prioritized set of actionable next steps across every area where meaningful opportunity existed.

 

Phase 3: Shopify B2B Website Redesign

Phase 3 applied those findings directly to a full website redesign. Working in partnership with designer Chris Pawlus on visual identity and creative direction, ACV managed the migration from the legacy PHP platform to Shopify - delivering a modern B2B experience with wholesale pricing functionality, customer account management, and optional direct-to-consumer capacity through a comprehensive B2B ecommerce replatforming process. The new platform implemented the structural, content, and SEO recommendations from the audit, supported by a UX/UI redesign built around the brand positioning work from Phase 1.

 

B2B Platform Transformation & Deliverables

The three-phase B2B digital transformation engagement produced a set of connected deliverables that moved Lactae Hevea from an aging, patchwork digital presence to a coherent, scalable platform built to serve its B2B market:

• Brand DNA framework: a refined brand pyramid and consumer profiles deck that gave the team a shared, documented brand language for the first time.
  
  
• Comprehensive Digital Assessment: a 30-45 page Digital Audit covering website performance, email outreach, competitive benchmarks, SEO findings, and prioritized next steps.
  
  
• Full platform relaunch: migration from a legacy PHP/Apache framework to Shopify, with wholesale pricing, customer accounts, and DTC capacity built in.
  
  
• UX/UI redesign and Digital Style Guide: reflecting the updated brand positioning, developed in partnership with Chris Pawlus.
  
  
• Search Engine Optimization: full sitewide implementation aligned to the assessment's keyword gap and technical SEO findings.
  
  
• Production and creative direction: delivering brand-aligned copy, updated content, and a site structure equivalent in scale to the existing property.

Three phases. One through line: a brand with fifty years of craft deserves a digital presence that reflects it. By the end of the engagement, Lactae Hevea had one.

 

Key Insight

B2B brands in premium manufacturing categories face a specific challenge that consumer brands rarely encounter in quite the same way: the customer - a wholesale buyer, a product development team, a designer sourcing materials for a new collection - is evaluating them with professional judgment. They are not browsing for inspiration. They are making a sourcing decision, and they will use every available signal to assess whether a supplier is at the level their brand requires.

A legacy website is one of those signals. So is an email that lands without context or structure. So is the absence of a clear brand voice in the materials a prospect encounters before a first conversation. For a brand like Lactae Hevea - whose physical product is genuinely exceptional - the risk is not that potential partners will doubt the quality of the soles. The risk is that the digital experience will cause them to move on before they ever place an order.

What the three-phase structure of this engagement recognized is that brand clarity, digital performance, and platform design are not independent variables. Each one amplifies or undermines the others. Getting the brand foundation right before the audit, and the audit findings into the design brief before the build, is what makes the final product more than a better-looking version of what existed before. It becomes infrastructure - the kind that lets a fifty-year-old craftsmanship story reach the buyers who need to hear it.

That is the work ACV does across every engagement: connecting strategy to execution so that neither one operates in isolation.

 

ACV Consulting | Leadership. Innovation. Purpose.