Chicago Wheel Express

Overview

How I helped a B2B wheel company transform into a consumer brand — and grow revenue by 35%

Project duration:

2021 – 2024 (UX & digital launch: 2021–2022)

My role:

UX Designer & Digital Lead

Tools:

Google Suite, Adobe Suite

Outcome: 70% traffic growth · 35% revenue increase · First consumer digital presence built from zero

Chicago Wheel Express had been a trusted B2B wheel repair operation for a decade — solid reputation, strong operational infrastructure, loyal distributor relationships. But the business had hit a ceiling. Leadership saw an opportunity in the Chicagoland consumer market. The problem: There was no website, no consumer brand, and no understanding of what local buyers actually needed.
I was brought in as the company's first UX and digital lead. My role evolved quickly from "build a website" into something much broader: design the entire digital ecosystem from scratch, define how the brand would speak to consumers for the first time, and create the infrastructure that would turn an offline operation into a B2C-ready business.
The core design challenge: How do you design a first-time digital experience for a customer segment the business has never spoken to — in a category where trust, locality, and credibility are everything?

The Problem

The business lacked:

Online visibility
Consumer accessibility
Structured lead generation
Brand positioning for B2C audiences

The risk wasn’t poor UX.
The risk was invisibility.

The Goal

Business Goal
Expand beyond B2B into a hybrid B2B/B2C model and establish local market presence.

Product Goals

Build the company’s first website
Establish digital brand identity
Create a lead-generation funnel
Improve local search visibility
Drive measurable revenue growth

Product Strategy

Unlike my concept projects, this was a live commercial engagement with real business constraints, a defined budget, and no formal research phase — which meant every design decision had to be grounded in business context, competitive awareness, and direct stakeholder feedback rather than structured user studies

Competitive audit

Since this project had no formal research phase, I built consumer understanding through every available channel:

Stakeholder interviews — what leadership knew about their customers after 10 years of B2B relationships
Competitor analysis — how other local and national wheel services presented themselves online and where they fell short
Social media listening — how Chicago consumers talked about wheel services, what language they used, what they complained about
Post-launch feedback — quote form submissions and direct calls revealed what customers needed that the site wasn't yet providing

Key Decisions

Mobile-first, always

Consumers were finding the site through local search on their phones — someone with a damaged wheel, researching on the go. Every design decision started with the mobile screen. Desktop was secondary.

Trust before features

With no reviews and no prior consumer presence, the homepage had one job: prove we're legitimate. I led with years in business, real shop photography, and a clear Chicago-local identity — credibility signals before anything else.

"Request a Quote" instead of public pricing

Pricing varies too much to list publicly without creating confusion or lost leads. I designed a simple quote request form as the primary CTA — low friction for the consumer, useful context for the business.

Resolving the CTA disagreement with data

Leadership wanted a phone number as the primary CTA. I believed a form would convert better with consumer audiences. Instead of debating it, we tested both — and the data made the decision for us.

Social proof through content, not a static gallery

After launch, customers kept asking to see examples of the work before booking. Rather than building a static gallery, I led a content quality overhaul on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter — better photography, stronger captions, consistent visual language. It answered the trust question and became a growth channel at the same time.

Site map

Danna's Notes I prioritized the service menu and warranty in the main navigation because local service customers make trust decisions based on transparency — they want to know what you offer before they call.

User flow

Booking process

Services

Home page

Customers:
To build trust

Social media

The Outcome

Within the first year:

70% growth in website traffic

35% increase in revenue — the first consumer-driven growth in 10 years

Phone-only contact replaced by a structured digital funnel

Social media transformed from a static page into an active trust and growth channel

What I Learned

Real-world UX rarely follows a textbook process — and that's not a weakness, it's the job. The most valuable moment on this project was replacing a CTA disagreement with a test: it turned a conflict into a shared decision made by evidence, not opinion. And the most important feature we built wasn't planned at the start — users told us they needed it after launch.

Next Steps

If this project were continuing:

Moderated usability testing on the quote request flow
SEO content strategy for local search capture
Reviews integration to build public social proof
Analytics review of social content to determine what drives the most site referrals