About the Client
The client is a home furniture buyer for several well-known retailers in Germany, focusing on providing outdoor leisure furniture products for the European market. Its core sales channels cover offline retail terminals and online e-commerce platforms in Germany and many other European countries. The client attaches great importance to the supporting service experience of products and has strict requirements on the localization, professionalism and ease of use of product manuals.
Customer requirement
The client’s main products are louvered home patio pergolas and their accessories such as curtains and roller blinds. The existing manuals provided by its Chinese manufacturer only contained basic illustrations without detailed assembly instructions, which were likely to cause difficulties in assembly for European end-users, a surge in customer service inquiries, and even affect product sales. The client’s specific requirements are as follows:
- Create localized, detailed and easy-to-understand English user manuals from scratch, covering the louvered home patio pergola and 3 supporting accessories;
- Translate the English manuals into multiple European languages to adapt to the reading habits of users in various European countries;
- Synchronously design color labels for product outer packaging, complying with the visual specifications of the European retail market;
- Ensure that the manual content is professional and accurate, with clear logic, meeting the relevant European standards for product instructions.
HI-COM’s Approach
- Form a Specialized Team: Quickly set up a professional team consisting of native English technical writers and Chinese Project Managers to ensure efficient communication with the factory and the professionalism of English content creation.
- On-Site Research and Evidence Collection: The team traveled from Shanghai to the factory in Linhai, Zhejiang Province, observed the entire product assembly process, recorded text, took photos and videos simultaneously, and accurately mastered the product structure, assembly steps and accessory characteristics, providing first-hand practical basis for manual creation.
- Manual Content Reconstruction: Based on the on-site research data, abandon the original simple illustration mode, and add core content such as product specifications, installation guidelines and safety tips; optimize the illustration design, adopt clear icons and localize professional expressions to eliminate ambiguity in understanding.
- Multilingual Translation and Design Implementation: After completing the first draft of the English manual, launch professional multilingual translation to ensure accurate terminology and authentic expression; in response to the lack of clear size and reference cases for color labels, design 3-4 sets of customized schemes, highlight function descriptions combined with product characteristics, and quickly iterate and optimize according to customer feedback.
- Full-Process Communication Management: Proactively coordinate two-way communication between the Chinese manufacturer and the German client, respond to feedback from both parties in a timely manner, solve problems such as delayed information transmission and vague requirements, and ensure the efficient progress of the project.
Achievements
- The project was successfully delivered in November, completing the entire process of English manual creation, multilingual translation and color label design for 4 products;
- The new manual has clear logic and easy-to-understand graphics and texts, which completely solves the problem of missing assembly instructions in the original manual and greatly reduces the customer service pressure of the client;
- The client highly recognized our team, describing it as “highly efficient, professional, and skilled at solving problems”, and reached a long-term cooperation intention. We will continue to undertake the manual creation and translation business of many more products of the client in the future;
- Helped the client’s products quickly adapt to the needs of the European market, and improved product competitiveness and brand service reputation.
