Meridian Configurator

A launch microsite and vehicle configurator that runs at sixty frames a second on a five-year-old phone.

Year: 2024
Location: Cape Town
Duration: 9 weeks

Client: Meridian Motors
Role: Web design, Front-end build, Performance
Discipline: Web & Digital
Delivered: 2024 · 9 weeks

The problem

What we were actually solving

Meridian's previous configurator was a 40 MB WebGL build that took eleven seconds to load and locked up on anything but a recent iPhone. Roughly seven in ten visitors on mobile abandoned it before the first render.

The approach

How the work was made

We replaced real-time 3D with a pre-rendered image sequence: thirty-six angles per configuration, served as AVIF, swapped on scroll. It looks identical to the user and weighs about a twentieth of what the WebGL build did.

Every configuration state lives in the URL, so a customer can send a dealer exactly what they built without an account, a login or a saved-build database. The dealer opens the link and sees the same car.

Performance budgets were agreed at the start and enforced in CI: any pull request pushing the page over 400 KB of JavaScript fails the build rather than being noticed at launch.

The outcome

Mobile completion rates went from under a third to more than three quarters, and the configurator became the primary lead source for the launch.

Time to interactive on a mid-range phone: 11s → 1.2sTime to interactive on a mid-range phone
Mobile configuration completion, up from 29%: 76%Mobile configuration completion, up from 29%
Total page weight: 40 MB → 1.8 MBTotal page weight
Weeks from brief to launch: 9Weeks from brief to launch