Abrasive Finishing Systems

The Client

Abrasive Finishing Systems (AFS) has supplied the metal finishing industry since 2002. From a technical centre and demonstration facility on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales, they sell cutting and grinding discs, flap discs, belts, polishing products, tungsten carbide burrs and metal finishing machinery to stainless steel fabricators and metalworking professionals across the UK and Ireland. They are the UK home of Cibo Abrasives and the exclusive UK and Ireland agent for Garboli machines.

This is a genuinely technical business. AFS do not just ship boxes. They solve finishing problems, run product trials on site, and back a network of distributors with specialist knowledge built over more than twenty years. Any website had to carry that expertise, not flatten it.

The Challenge

AFS came to us with a large, deeply technical catalogue that had outgrown its old site. The range runs to nearly 3,000 products across belts, discs, wheels, brushes, kits, burrs, sheets, machines and accessories, each with its own sizes, grits and applications. Over the years the structure had become difficult to navigate. Categories overlapped, and it was, in the words of AFS founder Barry Crompton, “next to impossible” to see where you were in the structure. That made it harder than it should have been for a customer to find the right item, and harder for the AFS team to add and manage products.

The brief was to rebuild the store from the ground up on a platform that could handle the scale, tidy up the structure, and make a complex range easy to shop, while protecting the technical content and search visibility AFS had built up over the years.

Rehouse a catalogue of nearly 3,000 products on WooCommerce without losing SKUs, pricing or product data
Impose a clear, logical category structure across a sprawling, technical range
Make it simple for a professional buyer to reach the exact product they need
Give the AFS team a site they could edit and manage themselves without a developer
Preserve the extensive technical and how-to content that sets AFS apart
Protect existing rankings and search visibility through the migration
Keep the site fast and mobile-friendly

What We Did

We rebuilt the AFS store as a custom WooCommerce site on WordPress, designed around how their customers actually shop. Rather than force a technical audience through a generic template, we built a category structure that mirrors the way the trade thinks about the range: by product type, by machine, by application and by material. The result is a catalogue that is far easier to move through, whether someone knows exactly which flap disc they want or is working back from the job in front of them.

To take the pressure off that navigation, we scoped and built a guided Find a Solution product finder. It walks a customer through a short series of questions about their material, machine and finish, then recommends the right abrasive or machine for the job. For a range this technical, it turns twenty years of AFS problem-solving into something a customer can use themselves at 2am, and it gives less experienced buyers a way in that a flat product grid never could.

Underneath the design, we handled the heavy lifting of the migration: moving the full catalogue of nearly 3,000 products onto WooCommerce, keeping the technical resources and how-to library intact, and laying technical SEO foundations so the hard-won search visibility carried across rather than being reset. We also built the product structure so the AFS team can manage it themselves, adding and moving products, editing pages and reshaping categories without needing a developer, with built-in warnings that flag issues as they go.

The build was project-managed by Josie, with Oakley leading development, the Find a Solution finder scoped by Aaron and built by Calum. The site is mobile-first, quick to load, and we continue to support and host it through an ongoing retainer.

The Results

AFS now has a modern eCommerce store that finally does justice to the range behind it. The catalogue is housed in a clear structure, the technical content that makes AFS a trusted voice in metal finishing is preserved and easy to reach, and the Find a Solution finder gives customers a genuinely useful way to navigate a complex range.

A full catalogue of nearly 3,000 products rebuilt on WooCommerce, built to handle the scale of the range
A logical, trade-led category structure that makes a technical catalogue easy to shop
A guided Find a Solution product finder that turns AFS expertise into self-serve buying help
A site the AFS team manages themselves, adding products and reshaping categories without a developer
Technical resources and how-to content carried across and kept front and centre
Technical SEO foundations in place to protect and build on existing visibility
A fast, mobile-first WordPress platform, backed by ongoing support and hosting

Most importantly, AFS now has a website that matches the depth of their business. It is a foundation to grow on, not a structure to work around.