Trauffer

The brief

I came onto Trauffer as a rescue. A previous design phase had stalled, about 25 hours of budget were left, and the brand is not small: Trauffer is wooden toys, the Bretterhotel, restaurants, and an event-driven Erlebniswelt — five businesses under one name. The job was to make them read as one site without inventing time I didn’t have.

The work

I spent the hours where they paid off: information architecture. I built a master hub that funnels visitors into the five branches and balances e-commerce (the toys) against high-end hospitality booking (the hotel and restaurants). With the map settled, the interface became a consequence of it rather than a pile of separate decisions. I ran the client meetings directly instead of through layers of handoff, so feedback closed in the same session it opened.

The result

A dev-ready, 42-page high-fidelity prototype, unified across Shop, Hotel, Restaurants, Events and HQ — delivered on spec inside the 25-hour window. The lesson I keep: on a rescue, the IA is the real deliverable. Solve navigation and role clarity first, and the UI stops being a decision surface.