Turning 25 years of expertise into a digital platform that made hardscaping feel possible
Western Interlock had spent decades manufacturing high-end paving stones and building a strong reputation across the Pacific Northwest.
But there was a problem.
For many homeowners, buying and installing paving stones felt intimidating—if not completely impossible.
Western Interlock knew how to help. Their in-person DIY seminars were already attracting customers to their manufacturing facility and showing people how to tackle projects themselves.
The question was:
How could we take that expertise beyond the physical seminar and make it useful to thousands of customers online?
That question became the foundation for DIY with WI.
The challenge
Western Interlock was a 25-year-old, family-owned manufacturing company with considerable product expertise and a strong physical reputation.
Digitally, however, the brand was barely established.
Potential customers had questions at every stage of the process:
- How do I choose the right product?
- Can I actually install this myself?
- How do I build a retaining wall?
- How do I cut a paving stone?
- How do I build a fire pit?
The difficulty of the project itself was becoming a barrier to the purchase.
So instead of simply promoting paving stones, we saw an opportunity to help Western Interlock do something more useful:
Take the hard out of hardscaping.
Turning customer questions into a creative platform
The traction from Western Interlock’s in-person DIY seminars gave us an important signal.
Customers didn’t just need products.
They needed knowledge and confidence.
We developed DIY with WI as a scalable educational content platform designed to help homeowners understand the process, believe they could do the work, and confidently move toward a purchase.
The strategy centered on turning the questions Western Interlock was already answering every day into useful digital experiences.
That meant creating content around real projects and real customer problems instead of starting with what the company wanted to promote.
Building the content engine
The concept grew into an ongoing system of educational articles, videos, tutorials, and social content.
Over the first three years, we published more than 150 tutorials covering subjects such as:
- How to build a retaining wall
- How to cut paving stones
- How to build a fire pit
- Product selection and installation
- Common DIY hardscaping problems
Video became an especially important part of the strategy.
We developed concepts, planned productions, worked directly with Western Interlock’s subject-matter experts, traveled for shoots, and turned practical knowledge into approachable content customers could actually use.
The goal wasn’t simply to produce more marketing.
It was to create the best answer available when a customer had a hardscaping question.
Using audience response to guide what came next
The creative work didn’t stop at publishing.
We used search behavior, website analytics, content performance, customer questions, and feedback from the sales team to understand what people found useful and where we should go deeper.
That created a feedback loop:
Customer question → useful content → audience response → insight → better content
The combination of creativity and analytics allowed the platform to evolve around what customers actually wanted rather than relying solely on assumptions.
And the market responded.
Within one year of publishing the first DIY tutorial, Western Interlock saw a:
351.97% increase in organic new users
More importantly, the content began influencing actual sales behavior.
Sales calls increased 50.74%.
And internally, the sales team discovered that the content was making their jobs easier.
“Sales Representatives keep telling me how this DIY with WI content cuts their talk time in half. Now we have well-documented answers to many customer’s most common questions about our products and how to use them. You’re making it much easier to make a sale and keep existing customers happy. Thank you!”
Colin Domoschofsky, Western Interlock
Evolving the digital experience around the strategy
As the content platform grew, Western Interlock’s decade-old website became a limitation.
The company now had a much richer educational ecosystem, but customers needed a better way to discover it, navigate products, and move from learning toward taking action.
So we redesigned WesternInterlock.com around the evolving customer journey.
The new experience combined:
- Website strategy
- Information architecture
- UX strategy
- Content strategy
- User testing
- Creative direction
- Copywriting
- UI/UX design
- Development
The goal was not simply to modernize the visual design.
It was to create a digital experience capable of supporting the larger strategy Western Interlock had grown into.
Within 30 days of launching the redesigned website:
- Users increased 65.0%
- Sessions increased 59.9%
- Average session duration increased 12.1%
- Bounce rate decreased 2.9%
Estimate requests and traffic also more than doubled within the first few days after launch.
The website became another expression of the larger idea: make hardscaping easier to understand, explore, and ultimately buy.
The result
What began as a question about scaling DIY education became a much broader digital transformation.
Western Interlock moved from having limited digital recognition to building an educational platform capable of reaching customers well beyond its physical locations.
The work:
- Turned customer questions into a repeatable creative strategy
- Scaled valuable in-person expertise into digital education
- Created more than 150 tutorials in the first three years
- Increased organic new users 351.97% within a year
- Increased sales calls 50.74%
- Reduced the amount of time sales representatives spent answering repetitive customer questions
- Created a stronger digital customer journey through a redesigned website
- Helped move a long-established manufacturing company toward a more modern, digital-first approach to marketing
Most importantly, the content created value before the sale.
Instead of asking customers to trust Western Interlock because the company said it was an expert, Western Interlock could demonstrate that expertise by helping people solve real problems.
“Structure has been amazing to work with. We are extremely satisfied with the work that they’ve done for us! I’d recommend them highly to anyone.”
Nathan Wright, Director of Marketing, Western Interlock
My role
I helped lead the strategy behind Western Interlock’s digital content platform, including customer and audience insight, content strategy, concept development, production planning, video direction, website strategy, customer journey thinking, and performance analysis.
I worked with Western Interlock’s internal team and Structure’s creative, content, design, development, and production partners to translate subject-matter expertise into useful customer experiences—from individual tutorials and videos to the broader website and digital ecosystem.
Strategy: Creative Strategy · Content Strategy · Audience Insight · Website Strategy · Customer Journey · Analytics & Iteration
Creative: Concept Development · Video Strategy · Production Direction · Copywriting · Creative Direction · Digital Experience
