At Yas Island, the holiday used to begin with homework. Before visitors could get to the fun, they faced a booking journey spread across two platforms and ten steps. A destination selling escape had built a small obstacle course at its entrance.
Horizontal Digital helped reduce that journey to three steps. The interesting number is seven: seven opportunities removed for someone to hesitate, get confused or close the tab. The project captures what this consultancy does when its language about “connected experiences” becomes something you can actually use.
- The job: connect customer-facing design with the systems underneath.
- The buyers: enterprise teams juggling websites, commerce, content and customer data.
- The useful idea: fix the handoff before adding another tool.
Ten steps between you and a holiday
The Yas Island work combined booking integration, a new content approach and personalization on Sitecore. After launch in 2021, the relationship continued through testing and updates. Horizontal’s case study reports a 550% increase in conversion rates across the booking funnel. That is a reported project outcome, rather than a promise that shortening any form will produce the same result.
A business in the handoff
Founded in 2003 by Sabin Ephrem and Chris Staley, Horizontal grew around an organizational gap. Marketing agencies understood how to attract people. Technology teams understood how systems worked. Customers kept encountering the space between those responsibilities.
In Digiday’s 2021 account, Seminole/Hard Rock’s digital team described hiring Horizontal after agencies struggled with the technology behind its collection of websites. The casino group had launched ten sites with Horizontal in the preceding year. Here was a buying decision driven by execution: somebody had to make the machinery behave.
“Our job is to connect people’s experiences [for Horizontal’s clients] and keep conversations going.”Chris Staley / Digiday, 2021
That places Horizontal between creative agencies, specialist implementation shops and large consultancies such as Accenture and Deloitte. Its argument rests on combining strategy and design with platform depth, particularly in Sitecore and Salesforce. Buying another software license does little to resolve a disagreement about who owns the customer journey.
The expensive habit of standing still
BOK Financial supplies a useful explanation of what changes a client’s mind. Its platform was nine years old. Nearly 60% of annual effort went into maintenance. The team was paying, in time and attention, to preserve yesterday.
Horizontal assessed total cost of ownership before the business case was approved. It then helped move the bank’s websites from a heavily customized Sitecore implementation to XM Cloud, with shared components, better search and client developers involved early. The published results include a 43% conversion-rate increase and a 60% reduction in deployment time.
For a buyer, the copyable move is the sequence: count the maintenance burden, establish a baseline, then compare the full operating paths. A migration has to earn its place against the work the current platform prevents. “New” is a poor business case by itself.
Build the second site first
Greystar presented a different version of the same puzzle. Its property brands had a patchwork of content systems and marketing teams. Each new site risked becoming another separate undertaking.
Horizontal built what the companies call a multi-site factory. The initial delivery took five months. Reusable website components, a flexible Figma design system and shared governance then supported further brand launches in eight weeks each. Middleware connected the experience to property systems and Salesforce.
The attraction is repetition with room for difference. A student-housing brand and a family-rental brand need their own identities; their teams can still share foundations. This is most useful when there really is a second, third and fourth launch ahead. Shared architecture also needs shared decisions. Without people willing to maintain common rules, a component library can become another cupboard nobody tidies.
The plumbing has a customer
At Pet Supplies Plus, the work reached into an especially tangible problem: helping people buy supplies and choose pickup or delivery across a franchise network. Horizontal describes a modernization involving more than 110 custom APIs and a migration covering over two million active users.
The platform mix included Sitecore commerce and content tools alongside Salesforce customer-data and marketing systems. Inventory, order management and search belonged in the same discussion. A customer buying dog food has little reason to care which department controls each one.
Horizontal sells the professional work around these connections: discovery, design, engineering, integration and continuing operation. Managed services extend the engagement beyond launch. Its HyperX accelerator adds reusable resources for Sitecore delivery. Enterprise teams with tangled systems are the natural buyers; a small business needing a simple information page has a different problem to solve.
DP World shows how much of this work concerns people inside the business. Horizontal began with regional stakeholder workshops, then developed information architecture and content governance alongside the technology. Shared assets and reusable components let local teams publish within a common framework. Its case study reports a 50% reduction in content duplication and a 30% year-over-year increase in leads following launch. The organizational change matters: regional flexibility becomes easier to manage when teams agree which parts should stay consistent.
That also explains the importance of specialist knowledge in this market. Horizontal announced 25 Sitecore MVPs in February 2026 and became an inaugural Diamond Partner that August. Its Salesforce practice reached Summit status in 2025. These credentials give prospective clients something specific to evaluate alongside the portfolio: experience with the platforms their own teams will have to run after the consultants leave.
AI arrives at the same junction
Recent work brings AI into that territory. In September 2026, Horizontal announced a chatbot-first experience for DP World. It retrieves approved website material, answers questions and, with a visitor’s agreement, passes details and conversation history to a human team. The proposed benefit is a shorter route from inquiry to useful help.
The company also built the Sense Agent with Pet Supplies Plus to analyze customer reviews and sentiment, winning Sitecore’s inaugural Agentic AI Partner Challenge in 2025. These examples make its AI direction concrete: finding information and interpreting feedback.
Horizontal remains independent and minority-owned, with a mission centered on expanding possibilities between brands and customers. Its published values emphasize collaboration and empathy. Those ambitions meet a practical test in every project: can the next person complete the task with less effort?
The question travels well. Try your own checkout. Follow a lead into sales. Ask someone to update the same fact across three sites. Somewhere along the route, a customer may be doing work your organization could remove.