Global export platform rebuild for a bilateral trade and investment board

The client is a UK-based bilateral trade and investment board connecting overseas textile manufacturers and exporters with international buyers. The brief was to reposition an existing single-market message into a genuinely global export story, while inheriting a large, pre-built codebase rather than starting from a blank page.

That codebase was a repurposed tech-forum template built for an entirely different business, complete with its own colour system, navigation, and roughly eighty routes that had nothing to do with textiles or trade.

The inherited template was not token-driven: its blues, greens, and accent colours were hardcoded across roughly 1,900 places in around 145 files, so a simple theme-variable swap would have re-coloured almost nothing visible on the page.

Its information architecture was built for a tech-forum audience, with around eighty routes spanning arbitration, ecosystem, and partner-programme pages that had no equivalent in a textile export business. Reorganising around products, services, membership, and market data meant deciding what to keep, what to fold together, and what to delete outright, without breaking the working components underneath (the header mega-menu, hero video, footer) that still had to carry the new brand.

The client also wanted the template's interactive market-data visualisation repurposed for live global textile trade figures rather than rebuilt from scratch, on a fixed scope that could not stretch into a full rewrite.

We audited the codebase file by file and re-themed the full colour system, hardcoded hex values included, across 225 files, so nothing of the old brand survived by accident. Surviving shared components (header, footer, hero video) were re-skinned in place rather than rebuilt, keeping their proven layout and motion.

We cut the route count from around eighty tech-forum pages down to the fifteen the new export-focused IA actually needed, folding adjacent old sections together where the new structure called for it and removing the rest outright rather than leaving them to rot unlinked.

The template's D3-and-topojson market visualisation was repointed at live global textile trade data instead of being thrown away, and membership and contact forms were wired into a Google Sheets and email pipeline so enquiries reach the team the same day.