Kingspan wins Storyblok Content Excellence Award for its multi-brand content architecture

At JoyConf 2026, Storyblok gave Kingspan its Content Excellence Award, which recognises a team that uses Storyblok to orchestrate content across multiple channels or brands. We're proud of the Kingspan team, and of our part in it: over the past year we've built the strategy, governance, design system and Storyblok platform for Kingspan Insulated Panels and Kingspan Group.

The award citation came from Garon Potter, Strategic CSM at Storyblok:

"Kingspan has built a content architecture that scales real complexity with real elegance, running multiple Storyblok organisations, each home to several distinct sub-brands, without losing coherence or control. It's a model for how large, multi-brand enterprises can structure content at scale while giving individual brands room to express their own identity."

In this award, content means the structure underneath every page: how brands, sites and components are organised so each team can publish without breaking the whole. That structure is what we built with Kingspan.

The problem every multi-brand group knows

Kingspan is a global group made up of divisions, and each division carries its own brands. Kingspan Insulated Panels alone includes Euroclad, Isocab, Isomasters and Maison de l'Étancheur, each with its own market and audience.

Give every brand full freedom and the group fragments. On the other hand, if you lock everything down centrally, local teams start working around you. On top of that, the existing platform, Adobe Experience Manager, had to be replaced before September 2026. So there was a hard deadline and a governance question to answer at the same time.

Strategy first

We started with a structured strategy and discovery track with Kingspan: diagnose the situation, agree a guiding policy, then define coherent actions. Three priorities came out of it:

• Get a grip on fragmented governance.

• Build a headless architecture that lasts.

• Fit the experience better to the people who use it.

From September 2025 we ran co-creation workshops with Kingspan teams on customer journeys, architecture, requirements, content operations and AI opportunities. They produced user archetypes for the two audiences that matter most, specifiers and trade users, along with mapped journeys, assumption maps, KPI frameworks and hundreds of design, content and architecture decisions.

A governance model that gives brands room

The balance Storyblok describes was a deliberate design choice. We proposed a design governance model that sets what is fixed at Group level and what each business unit can make its own. Kingspan confirmed it, and it now underpins every site in the rollout.

The Kingspan Design System puts that model into practice: a Figma library paired with a Storyblok component library. Other Kingspan divisions and their agencies around the world now build with it too.

The website concept follows the same logic. Priority guides and UX concepts balance inspiration with the technical detail specifiers need, and navigation lets visitors move between Group and divisions without losing their way.

From AEM to Storyblok in under six months

Storyblok replaced Adobe Experience Manager as Kingspan's content and experience platform, with a headless frontend. We delivered the implementation in under six months, ahead of the September 2026 deadline.

The rollout went live in waves. Kingspan Insulated Panels and its sub-brands launched from August 2026, followed by the Kingspan Group country sites in September 2026. Every site runs on the same design system.

Along the way we also:

• used AI to migrate content from the old platform into the new Storyblok structures, and to support content generation and translation

• built a custom search solution in a short window

• set up GA4, Google Tag Manager, cookie consent and a Looker Studio dashboard, so teams can see what's working from day one

What other multi-brand groups can take from this

1. Settle governance before design. Agree which decisions belong to the group and which belong to the brand, then build the design system around that line.

2. Build the design system for adoption. Kingspan's is now used by divisions and agencies we don't work with directly, which is how consistency spreads across a group.

3. Use the deadline. A fixed platform end date forced decisions that might otherwise have taken years.