Steel•Tek is a subsidy of B&K Industries that specializes in non-threaded, push fit plumbing parts. Unlike most B&K products, Steel•Tek pipes are made as components for home DIY construction rather than traditional plumbing.

Going After the "Pinterest Audience"

RocketFuel was approached by the client soon after this sub-brand was started by B&K, and was tasked with coming up with what the client viewed as a non-traditional plumbing site. Rather than targeting contractors and construction purchasers as usual, the new Steel•Tek site need to target a younger audience who might be more comfortable surfing Pinterest to find trendy home DIY projects. We decided to go in two directions for our homepages designs, one highlighting the idea of user submitted project blogs, and a more traditional layout that emphasized project part lists and instructions.

Our final designs went in the direction of highlighting the simplicity of the parts themselves, but still with with a large homepage callout and robust interior section focusing on projects. During the mobile development phase of this project special care was taken with the project pages to make sure that anyone could easily access a parts list while using their phone in a hardware store, or take assembly instructions anywhere with them.

Interaction Design

This project was the first at RocketFuel to utilize an interactive style tile using Corkscrew[Corkscrew]. With this system I was able to make several static html components that the dev team could plug into our CMS. This also let me focus on fine-tuning some of the more complex interactions we designed for the site and how they would work with client editable content.

Marketing to Millenials

RocketFuel also helped Steel•Tek set up a social media marketing plan. This meant providing their team with a series of templates that could be used to create posts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. These templates gave them a quick way to start posting projects and reaching DIYers as well as an easy way to stay on brand as their social media following grew.

This site won a Silver Addy from the [Memphis AAF] in the category of Consumer Website Design.

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