Watson Fuels is one of the UK's leading land fuel distributors, serving domestic customers, businesses, farmers and agricultural operations from a network of depots across England, Wales and Scotland. Growcreate partnered with Watson Fuels to migrate and rebuild their digital estate on the latest version of Umbraco CMS, hosted on optimised Azure environments, creating a flexible multi-audience platform that aligns brand values across the business and gives internal teams the tools to communicate consistently, efficiently and at scale.
Bottom line up front
Watson Fuels is a high-volume, multi-audience fuel distributor serving B2C, B2B and agricultural customers across the UK, operating in a sector where sustainability credentials and ESG values are increasingly central to customer decision-making.
Growcreate delivered a full-stack programme covering experience design, Umbraco CMS development, Azure hosting, DevOps and ongoing support, consolidating a fragmented multi-site estate into a single, flexible platform.
The new platform reduced the overhead of managing multiple sites, gave marketing and content teams reusable content blocks and streamlined editorial workflows, and enabled consistent brand messaging across all audiences, regions and channels.
Throughout the engagement, Growcreate has worked to support Watson Fuels' teams, enhance the quality and consistency of their digital presence, and evolve the platform under an Agile framework as the business and its sustainability story continues to develop.
The challenge
Watson Fuels has been part of British life for nearly 70 years, supplying heating oil, farm fuels, road diesel, lubricants and fuel cards to homes, farms and businesses across the UK. With over 700 staff, 35 regional depots and a diverse customer base spanning domestic households, agricultural businesses and commercial operators, communicating consistently across all of those audiences is a significant undertaking.
At the same time, the energy sector was shifting. Customers, whether homeowners managing heating costs, farmers planning their operations or businesses managing fleets, were increasingly focused on sustainability, ESG credentials and choosing suppliers who could demonstrate a genuine commitment to the energy transition. Watson Fuels had been carbon neutral since 2019 and had a strong story to tell, but their digital estate was not built to tell it well. A spread of separate sites made it difficult to maintain consistent brand messaging, align departments around shared values, or satisfy brand and regulatory requirements across regions. Marketing teams needed a platform that could move at the pace of the brand, and a partner who understood the challenge.
Our approach
Experience design and brand alignment
Growcreate worked with Watson Fuels to understand the full range of audiences using their digital estate: domestic customers ordering heating oil, farmers managing farm fuel accounts and businesses with commercial fuel and fleet needs. From that understanding, we helped design a platform architecture and content structure that could serve all three audiences clearly from a single, unified platform, without one customer group's journey getting in the way of another's.
The design approach centred on moving the experience away from traditional product promotion and towards brand storytelling, giving Watson Fuels the space to communicate their sustainability commitments, their values and what genuinely sets them apart. UX patterns were built to support that shift, making the platform feel consistent and trustworthy whether a customer arrived looking for a home heating oil quote or information about farm fuel supply.
Umbraco development, Azure hosting, DevOps and support
In 2022, Growcreate migrated Watson Fuels to the latest version of Umbraco CMS, consolidating what had been a spread of separate sites into a single, flexible multi-site solution hosted on optimised Azure environments. The new architecture gave marketing and content teams a far more manageable editorial experience, with reusable content blocks that create a consistent style across the site and streamline the workflow for editors and marketers. Updates that previously required significant effort can now be made quickly and published with confidence.
Growcreate introduced DevOps practices to support safe, structured releases and reduce the risk of changes affecting live customer journeys. Working under an Agile framework, the team continues to iterate and improve the platform in response to evolving business needs, with ongoing support keeping the solution stable, secure and ready to grow.
"Looks like you’ve got some great folks on the Grow team, and a good way of working – well organised, continued progress, and good communication. Great!"
Ian Probert, Marketing Director, EMEA, Watson Fuels
Results and impact
For Watson Fuels' customers, the new platform delivers a clearer, more consistent experience whatever their relationship with the business. Domestic customers, farmers and commercial buyers all find journeys designed with their needs in mind, with a brand voice that reflects Watson Fuels' values and sustainability commitments rather than defaulting to traditional fuel industry messaging. That consistency builds the kind of trust that matters when customers are choosing long-term energy suppliers.
For the internal team, the change has been equally significant. Consolidating multiple sites into one Umbraco platform has delivered real savings and removed the complexity of managing separate editorial environments. Reusable content blocks and a streamlined workflow mean the marketing team can update and publish across all audiences without unnecessary friction or bottlenecks. Growcreate continues to support, enhance and evolve the platform alongside Watson Fuels, helping the business stay current, consistent and ready for what comes next as the UK energy landscape continues to change.
