Fueling Haffner’s for Its Next 100 Years with XM Cloud
Overview
Founded in 1925, Haffner’s is a 100-year-old brand serving consumers and businesses across Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine with fuel delivery, HVAC services, fuel stations, convenience stores and car washes. As Haffner’s approached its centennial, it sought a digital transformation to celebrate its evolving brand, unify its offerings, and build a scalable marketing platform. The company partnered with Velir to establish a cohesive digital experience that honors its legacy while fueling its future evolution.
With a long history and deep roots across New England, Haffner’s recognized that honoring their legacy wasn’t enough—they needed to shape the future. They set out to build a bold, unified digital presence that could reflect the full breadth of their services and scale with their ambitions. That’s where Velir came in.
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Challenge
Throughout its history, Haffner’s grew through multiple acquisitions, resulting in a fragmented brand and decentralized digital presence. As it neared its centennial, the company recognized that its legacy website no longer reflected its full range of services, lacked flexibility, and couldn’t support the brand’s modern marketing needs.
A seamless digital experience was critical to Haffner’s next phase of growth. While customers regularly engaged with Haffner’s products, those interactions were often attributed to partner brands like Mobil or Gulf,—limiting direct connection and loyalty. To take ownership of the customer relationship, Haffner’s needed to evolve into a digital-first brand, anchored by a modern, flexible webize platform built to support its unique, multi-service business model.
Haffner’s challenges included:
- Fragmented Digital Experiences: Haffner’s lacked a unified experience across its digital channels.
- Technical Limitations: Haffner’s legacy CMS made scalability, integrations, and security extremely difficult.
- Friction Between Platforms: Haffner’s struggled to streamline the distribution and management of content in cross-channel campaigns.
- Value-Added Infrastructure: Haffner’s needed to build the digital infrastructure required to support loyalty programs designed to reduce churn.
Approach
To support Haffner’s growth ambitions, Velir led a strategic transformation across experience design, platform modernization, and marketing alignment—reengineering the digital ecosystem to better serve both the business and its customers.
We began by developing a modular design system that brought consistency to Haffner’s visual identity across fuel delivery, HVAC services, gas stations, and car washes. This ensured flexibility for future updates while reinforcing brand recognition.
Simultaneously, we aligned marketing objectives with technical execution — integrating content strategy, UX improvements, and backend flexibility to support new programs like loyalty and personalization.
Our phased approach included:
- Brand cohesion: Translating Haffner’s refreshed branding into a unified digital experience across all services.
- Flexible content architecture: Empowering internal teams with intuitive tools and scalable components through Sitecore XM Cloud.
- Customer-centric UX: Streamlining pathways for residential and commercial users to find information, take action, and engage with the brand.
- Technical modernization: Replacing legacy systems with cloud-native infrastructure, while planning for a customer data platform (CDP) integration and advanced analytics.
- Content development and SEO: Crafting optimized, on-brand messaging that clearly communicates service value and boosts discoverability.
- Design integration: Ensuring visuals and UI components reflected both the company’s heritage and its forward-looking identity.
Solution
Velir delivered a fully reimagined website powered by Sitecore XM Cloud — a digital experience platform that brings together Haffner’s offerings and customers under a single, cohesive umbrella.
The new platform serves as more than just a marketing site; it functions as a foundational layer for digital operations, enabling the brand to scale campaigns, personalize user journeys, deepen customer relationships ultimately building a 360° loyalty engine. Visitors now experience a seamless, intuitive journey whether they’re scheduling a fuel delivery, locating a gas station, or signing up for a car wash membership.
This transformation not only modernized Haffner’s digital footprint but positioned it for future innovation, giving the brand the tools and infrastructure to grow smarter over its next 100 years.
The relaunch delivered a strong foundation and promising early engagement results, validating the strategic choices made by Haffner’s and the project team:
- A Unified Digital Experience: Velir delivered a scalable system that ensures brand consistency across all Haffner’s properties.
- Improved Functionality: Sitecore XM Cloud gave Haffner’s access to personalization, enterprise-grade security, and more.
- Frictionless Content Management: Sitecore Page Builder enabled streamlined content sharing and management across Haffner’s digital properties.
- Increased Engagement: Haffner’s new digital experience had a substantial impact.
- Over 34,000 call-to-action clicks in the first two months after launch.
- 1,400 new form completions in the first two months after launch.
- 247% increase in Page views compared to the same time the previous year
- 58% increase in Sessions compared to the same time the previous year
"This digital transformation has been a game changer for Haffner’s. For the first time, we have a true digital experience that reflects who we are today — and where we're going. It brings together all parts of our business under one brand and one platform, while giving us the tools to create loyalty, drive engagement, and grow smarter."