Two Products Inside a Manufacturing Business Navigating Digital Transformation
Industry
Manufacturing / eCommerce
Company size
200 - 500 Employees
About
Founded in Sydney in 1916, Oldfields is an iconic Australian brand known for manufacturing high-quality paint application tools and engineered scaffolding systems. Trusted by both trade professionals and DIY enthusiasts, the company provides comprehensive equipment designed for safety, efficiency, and a superior finish.
12 weeks
Increase to top-line revenue since using Artifact
The Situation
Oldfields is one of Australia’s most recognised scaffolding and hardware manufacturers. The business has been operating for decades, supplies to trade and retail, and has a national footprint through independent hardware stores, major retail partners, and direct trade relationships.
By 2022, Oldfields faced a digital transformation question that many established manufacturers eventually face: how do you build the digital tools your trade customers need, without disrupting the physical business that is working?
Halcrow was engaged across two distinct product streams — both of which touched different parts of the business, and both of which required understanding Oldfields’ operational reality before touching any technology.
Product 1: Scaffpack — a mobile application designed for professional scaffolders managing Oldfields scaffolding packages in the field. Scaffolders needed to manage equipment, track packages, and navigate compliance documentation on site, not in an office.
Product 2: Click’N’Collect / Oldfields Shop Online — an eCommerce platform enabling trade and retail customers to purchase Oldfields products online and collect from distributor locations. A Shopify-based implementation with integrations to Shippit and the broader Oldfields retail operation.
These were not adjacent products. Scaffpack was a field operations tool for trade professionals. Click’N’Collect was a consumer-facing eCommerce capability. They required different design thinking, different technical approaches, and different stakeholder management — and they ran simultaneously.
Why they called us
Oldfields’ digital ambitions were driven from within: Michael Micallef and Stephanie Levy were the key stakeholders.
The decision to work with Halcrow came from a shared view that building digital products for trade professionals required genuine understanding of how those professionals actually work — not assumptions based on consumer app patterns.
Law 1: Start with the objective, not the solution. A scaffolding management app that does not reflect how a scaffolder manages a job on site is not useful to a scaffolder. The product needed to start with field research, not a feature list.
How we worked
Scaffpack: Research-Led Mobile Product Development
Phase 1: Field Research
Before significant design work was done, the team conducted field interviews with Oldfields’ scaffolding customers. The research involved going to scaffolding sites and understanding the operational reality: how scaffolders currently track equipment, what documentation they manage, where their pain points sit, and what a mobile tool would need to do to actually fit into their working day.
The insights from these interviews were organised through Dovetail and directly informed the product design. The Figma designs that followed the research reflected what scaffolders told us — not what a design team assumed they needed.
Phase 2: Mobile Application Development
The Scaffpack application covered package and equipment management for scaffolders in the field, compliance documentation access, staff profiles and credential management, and mobile-first UX that could be used on a construction site.
The design implementation followed a structured process: Dovetail insights, Figma design, implementation review, then build. Design decisions were traceable back to user research, not product intuition.
Click’N’Collect: eCommerce Platform Operation
The Oldfields online shop was built on Shopify, with integration to Shippit for order fulfilment routing and email notification to stores for click-and-collect orders.
The operational reality of running an eCommerce platform for a manufacturer with a distributed retail network surfaced typical integration challenges: order notifications not reaching stores, phone numbers missing from orders causing fulfilment issues, and promotional mechanics requiring configuration that was technically straightforward but operationally important.
The team managed the platform’s ongoing operation, surfacing and resolving issues through the standard support process and maintaining Shopify billing and administration. The Click’N’Collect platform ran continuously from launch through mid-2025.
WHAT CHANGED
Scaffpack: Oldfields moved from having no digital tool for their trade customers to a purpose-built, research-grounded mobile application designed specifically for the scaffolding context. The product was not designed in a studio — it was designed from field conversations with the people who would use it.
Click’N’Collect: Oldfields established an eCommerce presence that allowed trade and retail customers to purchase and collect products online. The platform operated reliably, and the integration with their physical retail network — through Shippit and store email notifications — meant the digital and physical channels worked together rather than in parallel.
WHY THIS WORKED
Oldfields is an operational business. The people who buy their products are professional tradespeople. Digital tools that do not fit into a tradesperson’s actual working day do not get used — regardless of how well they are built.
The Scaffpack research process was designed to close the gap between what product designers assume and what professional scaffolders actually do. The insights that came back from field interviews shaped every significant design decision that followed.
Law 4: Understand the environment before building for it. Trade technology products fail when they are designed from the inside — from assumptions about user needs that have not been tested against operational reality. Going to the sites, talking to the scaffolders, and building from what they told us was the only approach that would produce a product they would actually use.