Commercial refrigeration · B2B equipment hire
Gastro-Cool UK
A 50% discount is a gift and a liability in the same sentence. This project shows I can take a commercially risky proposition and engineer the surrounding signals — proof, structure, operational clarity, conversion path — until it reads as a manufacturer's seasonal initiative, not a promotion.
Trust-led B2B microsite for a serious manufacturer — a seasonal, conversion-focused three-page flow that makes a 50% co-exhibitor offer feel credible, operationally dependable, and easy to act on before a hard March deadline.
- Client
- Gastro-Cool (UK operations)
- Industry
- Commercial refrigeration · B2B equipment hire
- Year
- 2026
- Role
- Joseph Hilson — positioning, UX, design, front-end build, copy shaping
The thesis
Trust does the conversion work — not persuasion.
When the surrounding signals are right — real partner brands, real product specs, real contact details, real terms, real operational reassurance — a 50% offer reads as a manufacturer's seasonal initiative rather than a promotion. Persuasion copy is the wrong instrument for a serious commercial buyer; quiet, factual proof is the right one.
02 · Offer framing
The 50% framed for credibility: what is included, who it is for, what the limits are, and a single primary CTA. The hairline border, the soft credibility strip above and the quiet stock note do more reassurance work than any persuasion copy could.
By the numbers
- 20+
- Years of pedigree
- 250k+
- Branded units in field
- 50%
- Co-exhibitor discount
- 3
- Pages, one goal
- 4
- Show-approved models
- Mar 2026
- Hard offer deadline
Overview
A focused English-language microsite for a German-founded specialist in branded display refrigeration, built around the UK Food & Drink Shows 2026 (NEC Birmingham, 13–15 April). One commercial window, one conversion goal: turn co-exhibitors into qualified enquiries for branded show-floor fridges before a hard March cut-off. The work was not to design a microsite — it was to engineer credibility. Every choice — the three-page flow, the trusted-by logo bar, the RRP-versus-discounted pricing logic, the embedded enquiry form, the operational reassurance copy — exists to remove a specific source of doubt a serious buyer would have about a half-price offer from a supplier they have not yet met.
The problem
01
A 50% discount creates doubt as quickly as it creates interest.
The target user is a commercial buyer or stand manager preparing for the UK Food & Drink Shows: time-pressured, comparing a small set of suppliers, often deciding on a phone between meetings. A discount that size invites the obvious questions — is this real, who is behind it, will the unit arrive on the stand on time, what exactly is included, what happens if something goes wrong. A generic landing page would either undersell the offer (leaving margin on the table) or amplify it (making a serious manufacturer look like a flash sale). Both outcomes lose the enquiry before the form is ever opened.
The insight
02
For B2B equipment buyers, trust does the conversion work — not persuasion.
Persuasion copy is the wrong instrument for a commercial buyer comparing suppliers. They are not looking to be convinced; they are looking to be reassured. The job of the site is to remove doubt at every scroll — real product specs with RRP and discounted pricing side by side, real partner brands carried as a logo bar rather than a testimonials slider, real contact details, real delivery and stand logistics, real terms. Once doubt is gone, the enquiry happens almost automatically. The site does not need to sell harder. It needs to be more obviously serious than the alternatives in the buyer's tab.
03 · Trust + reassurance
Operational reassurance is given as much room as the offer itself: what is included, who delivers it, what the stand experience will be. Trust signals are the conversion mechanic — not the decoration around it.
The concept
03
Three anchors: the event, the offer, the proof.
The UKFDS 2026 banner is the visual anchor of the hero — buyers immediately recognise the show they are already preparing for, and the offer is contextualised before it is even read. A single, unambiguous proposition follows: 50% off branded display fridges for co-exhibitors, valid until March. A trusted-by logo strip of recognised global drinks brands — Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Diageo, Grolsch, Jarritos, BuzzBallz, Tenzing — sits directly under the hero, with 20+ years and 250,000+ branded units repeated as quiet trust metrics throughout. Everything downstream is engineered to be linear and frictionless from there.
The product experience
04
A three-page flow with one conversion goal.
Home, Select Fridge, Thank You. No secondary navigation, no blog, no scope creep. Home carries the hero, the offer framing, the operational reassurance and the credentials. Select Fridge presents four show-approved models with RRP versus co-exhibitor pricing on the same row — the discount is shown as a delta, not a slogan — alongside specs and external links to full product pages on gastro-cool.eu. The enquiry form is embedded directly beneath the model selection rather than hidden behind a separate Contact route: the buyer picks a model and submits in the same gesture, with company information, stand number, invoice address and delivery contact captured from the start. Submissions are routed to the UK operations inbox via a backendless form integration — no infrastructure overhead, immediate stand-up, easy to retire after the show.
04 · Credentials
20+ years, 250,000+ branded units, real partner brands — Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Diageo, Grolsch, Jarritos, BuzzBallz, Tenzing. A quiet, factual proof block: no testimonials theatre, no inflated claims, no badges with nothing behind them.
The visual direction
05
Dark, manufacturer-grade, intentionally not AI-looking.
Navy (#1A2332 main, #0F1621 deep) with a teal accent (#009DA3) drawn from Gastro-Cool's corporate identity. Dark mode as default — appropriate for a manufacturer, and it lets the branded product photography do the heavy lifting. Bold display weights for headlines, restrained sans-serif for body. A 12-column grid with intentional asymmetry. Subtle noise overlays, faint blueprint-grid patterns, and gradient vignettes give the dark surfaces a tactile, designed-on-purpose feel. A single unified line-icon system with consistent stroke weight — mismatched icon styles are the clearest tell of an AI-generated site, and this one deliberately avoids it.
In use
Across the surfaces.
05 · Pricing logic
RRP and co-exhibitor pricing on the same row — the discount shown as a delta, not a slogan. Stock state, exhibitor limit and deadline stated above the models. The product page and the conversion path are the same surface.
06 · Low-friction conversion
Structured B2B data captured from the start — company, stand number, invoice address, delivery contact — and routed straight to the UK operations inbox with no backend overhead. Friction-light, but never sloppy.
A 50% discount headline is a gift and a liability in the same sentence. The work was to surround it with enough quiet, factual proof — real partner brands, real specs, real terms, real operational reassurance — that it reads as a manufacturer's seasonal initiative, not a promotion.
My role
Joseph Hilson — positioning, UX, design, front-end build, copy shaping.
- 01Positioning — framing a 50% offer in a way that increases credibility rather than eroding it, and aligning the entire microsite to a single seasonal commercial window.
- 02UX & information architecture — collapsing the site to a three-page flow with one conversion goal, and embedding the enquiry path inside the product surface rather than hiding it behind a separate Contact route.
- 03Trust & conversion thinking — placement and weighting of trust signals (event, partner brands, credentials, operational reassurance, real terms), form-friction reduction, and backendless enquiry routing into the UK operations inbox.
- 04Visual design & design system — manufacturer-grade dark palette, typography pairing, motion language, texture system, unified iconography and reusable component variants on a semantic token layer.
- 05Front-end build — React, Vite, TypeScript and Tailwind on a custom token system, with shadcn/ui primitives and restrained framer-motion.
- 06Copywriting — practical British English, zero fluff, manufacturer-grade B2B tone calibrated to a serious commercial buyer.
- 07Mobile responsiveness — bespoke breakpoints for buyers walking the show floor on a phone, rather than default Tailwind cascades.
In summary
Status: live in production at gastro-cool.uk. Demonstrable from the live build — the full three-page flow, the trusted-by logo bar carrying real partner brands, the 50% co-exhibitor offer mechanic with RRP and discounted pricing on the same row, a working enquiry form routed to the UK operations inbox, and responsive behaviour across desktop, tablet and mobile. No conversion, enquiry-volume or commercial-uplift figures are claimed here — the site is a seasonal microsite tied to a March 2026 deadline, and performance metrics belong to the client. Mobile screens (hero, select fridge, enquiry) are scheduled for a second-pass capture from the live site at native device resolution and will slot into the gallery without redesign — the layout already accommodates portrait shapes, as demonstrated on the Dorking Solarium case study.