IC-Direct
Client
ENGINEERING
IC-Direct
A new website and an AI-enriched component search aggregating live stock from five distributors, live before Electronica.
Electronic components
Industry
Engineering, AI Data Pipeline
Services
Germany
Region
2024-present
Year
A catalogue that earns trust, and a search that reflects reality.
IC Direct distributes electronic components to manufacturers in automotive, medical, aerospace, telecom, and industrial automation. Most sales start with an engineer looking up a part and checking availability. The old site looked dated and ran on static data that went stale, roughly 311,000 lines of JSON nobody could keep current. They wanted a modern site, a sharper red brand, and a component search backed by live, multi-source stock, all live before their appearance at Electronica.
Trust
A modern site that earns trust on the first visit
Live stock
Real availability, not a stale static file
Fast search
Instant, typo-tolerant part lookup
Deadline
Live before Electronica
A rebuilt site, and a live multi-source search.
The site leads with the new brand and restrained motion, GSAP line-drawing animations and a Spline 3D element rather than effects for their own sake, with light and dark modes. At its centre is the component search: an engineer types a part number, gets instant suggestions, sees current availability, and sends a request in a few clicks, tracked in HubSpot. Underneath sits a live ingestion platform that replaced the static JSON, pulling stock from five distributors and normalising it into one product model so a single part resolves across sources.
From brief to a self-maintaining catalogue: rebuild, ingest, launch.
01.
Planning and strategy
We started from a brief written by their team in Germany and a close look at how inquiries flow, from Google Ads keyword to on-site search to request, exploring two design directions before settling on one.
02.
Website build
WordPress on Sage 10 with Tailwind, GSAP, Spline 3D, and Alpine.js, a reusable animation system rather than one-off effects, light and dark modes, structured data and hreflang, and Redis caching, carried through a second design generation as the brand sharpened.
03.
Live data platform
Scrapers for five distributors, DigiKey over its OAuth API, Mouser over its paginated API, and Rocelec, Arrow, and Avnet over headless-browser scraping through a proxy network with rate limiting and circuit breaking, normalised into one product model, with an OpenAI batch pipeline writing clean English and German descriptions and Meilisearch powering instant, typo-tolerant search.
04.
Launch and beyond
We deployed ahead of Electronica through staging with automated deploys on every push via GitHub Actions and Deployer, then stayed on as IC Direct's external engineering team. Catalogue refreshes run with atomic table swaps, so data updates without downtime.
The numbers speak.
5
Distributor sources, one catalogue
311K
Lines of static data replaced by live ingestion
2 languages
Auto-generated product descriptions
Zero
Downtime on catalogue refresh
The static file became a live platform that maintains itself across five suppliers in two languages, and the relationship did not end at launch.
Ana Silvestru, Marketing Manager at IC-Direct GmbH“We are more than satisfied and are already planning the next project.”
Search across all your sources at once
We built IC-Direct a component search that pulls live stock from five distributors, live before their big trade show. If your customers need to find and compare in one place, we can build that.
Starts with a free 30-minute discovery call.
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