How A Global Multinational Trusted Hatch Across Three International Markets.
How an approximately three-year relationship across the UK and Ireland led to designing and developing three localised Australian websites with custom location journeys.
The brief
Build Once For The Group. Adapt Carefully For The Market.
ME Group needed a digital partner who could work within an established international brand system while responding to the products, audiences and operational requirements of each market. The relationship grew from improvements across UK and Irish websites into the design and development of three distinct Australian sites.
- Client
- ME Group
- Industry
- Automated Self-Service & Retail Technology
- Services
- Web Design & Development, Webflow Development, SEO & Analytics, Custom Location Tools
- Timeline
- Approximately three years across separate projects
- Status
- Websites live
A relationship built through repeat delivery
ME Group is a London Stock Exchange-listed international business and a constituent of the FTSE 250 index, behind automated self-service brands including Photo.ME and Wash.ME. Its products operate across markets, but the customer need is always local: find a nearby booth or launderette, understand the service available in that country, or assess whether an installation makes commercial sense for a retail location.
Our relationship began with focused work for ME Group teams in the UK and Ireland. Rather than replacing every website, we improved the platforms already in place—fixing broken experiences, creating new sections and pages, strengthening technical SEO, implementing analytics and adding location tools.
Each successful project built confidence in the next. That repeat trust eventually led the Australian business to ask Hatch to create a coherent local web presence for ME Group and two of its best-known consumer brands.
Three sites had to work as one system
The Australian project involved three different websites with three different jobs.
The ME Group Australia website is primarily a business-to-business platform. It needs to help retailers, property operators and potential commercial partners understand a portfolio of self-service products, compare business models and move into an informed sales conversation.
Photo.ME Australia serves consumers looking for passport and ID photographs, printing and other photo services. Wash.ME Australia helps people understand the self-service laundry offer and find a convenient location.
A single generic group website could not serve those audiences well. Equally, three disconnected builds would have created inconsistency and unnecessary work for the local team. We treated the brief as one digital system expressed through three focused customer journeys.
| Starting position | What we changed | Commercial purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Group-wide brand rules applied across different markets | Built a shared visual and interaction language, then localised products, content and calls to action | Protect brand consistency without forcing Australian customers through irrelevant information |
| B2B partners and end customers had fundamentally different questions | Separated the corporate, photo and laundry journeys across three websites | Give each audience a faster route to the information and next step that matters |
| Physical services depend on customers finding a nearby machine | Built custom Photo.ME and Wash.ME location finders using Webflow CMS and custom code | Connect online discovery with an offline visit |
| New Australian products needed room to grow | Created reusable content structures for services, locations, brochures and enquiries | Give the local team a platform that can expand without another rebuild |
| Measurement was inconsistent across earlier properties | Implemented analytics and reporting foundations | Give the team clearer evidence for future website and market decisions |
Global brand standards, local commercial journeys
Localisation was not a matter of changing the country name in the footer. The group controls an established international brand, while product availability, business models, terminology and customer expectations differ by market.
We worked inside those brand constraints and changed what the Australian experience needed: the site structure, product emphasis, partner funnels, brochures, contact routes and supporting information. This created familiarity across the portfolio without making the sites feel like copies of another country’s operation.
On the corporate site, the journey is organised around the value to a potential site partner. Visitors can explore photo, laundry, food-service and technology machines, understand different commercial models and make an enquiry with useful context already established.
The two consumer sites are deliberately more direct. Photo.ME makes the use cases clear—from official ID photographs to printing—before directing people to a nearby service. Wash.ME explains how the launderettes work, what customers can wash and how to find the closest location.
Turning a physical network into a useful digital experience
For both Photo.ME and Wash.ME, the website only completes its job when it helps someone reach a physical machine. The location finder therefore had to be part of the core customer journey, not a generic map embedded as an afterthought.
We built the Australian locators with Webflow CMS and custom code. Each location can be managed as structured content, while customers can filter the network and find the most relevant service in their state or area.
That structure also creates a foundation for location-led organic search. As the Australian network expands, useful location pages can answer searches with local intent and give each new booth or launderette a discoverable place on the web. The commercial opportunity is clear, but it should be measured with approved Search Console, location-page and direction-click data before a traffic or lead result is claimed.
A platform the Australian team can keep expanding
The immediate outcome is a much clearer Australian web presence: one corporate website for commercial partners and two focused consumer websites that turn interest into a practical next step.
The less visible outcome matters too. Reusable page structures, CMS-managed locations, analytics foundations and consistent enquiry routes make the platform easier to maintain as products and the physical network grow. The Australian team can add information and locations without redesigning the customer journey each time.
This is the same principle that made the wider relationship work. We did not impose one market’s website on another. We learned the group system, understood the local requirement and built the right layer on top of it.
The evidence is repeat trust across markets
The scope of the relationship is itself meaningful evidence: teams in three markets have trusted Hatch with website, search, analytics and workflow projects over approximately three years.
Jason Kavanagh, Manager at ME Group, described the earlier UK and Irish work in his public review:
Highly recommend! Could not rate Ben high enough, he is a true pleasure to work with and helped us deliver a key departmental project I had been working towards for the past year! Ben worked with both the UK and Ireland subsidiaries, tailoring details to each country’s requirements to deliver high quality websites and seamless back office systems all within a few weeks.
He also highlighted the analytics set-up, reporting and day-to-day communication, and said he looked forward to working together again on future projects. The subsequent Australian brief is practical evidence of that confidence becoming another engagement.
What comes next
The platform now gives ME Group Australia room to expand its products, locations and local search footprint while keeping the corporate and consumer journeys clear across three coordinated websites.
For a multinational or multi-brand organisation, the lesson is straightforward. Consistency does not require every market to have the same website. It requires a partner who can preserve the system while adapting the journey.
Explore our web design and development work, see how the relationship also produced a custom refund workflow for the UK and Ireland, or talk to Hatch about a multi-site brief.
Common questions
Frequently Asked Questions
What did Hatch deliver for ME Group Australia?
Hatch designed and developed three localised websites for ME Group Australia, Photo.ME Australia and Wash.ME Australia, including partner and customer journeys, brochure and enquiry routes, analytics and custom location finders.
How did Hatch balance ME Group's global brand with Australian requirements?
Hatch retained the group's established visual and brand rules while adapting the information architecture, products, content, calls to action and location journeys to the Australian market.
“Ben did an outstanding job assisting us at ME Group Ireland in developing our websites. He optimised them with SEO, provided insightful reports, and advanced our digitisation of customer care, streamlining processes to help provide better service more efficiently to our customers. We highly recommend Ben to anyone looking to elevate their websites.
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