Safetline: a 50-year-old factory that got a whole system behind its website

The starting point

Safetline has made safety footwear for more than 50 years and is ISO 9001 certified. The catalog is technical: every model combines upper material, sole, toe cap, insole and a set of protection standards. Buyers are industrial purchasers, safety engineers and distributors, people who need the right spec fast.

The old website was three separate WordPress installs, one per language, each with its own content and out of sync with the others. The store lived on a fourth platform. Changing a product photo meant touching four places, and the marketing team depended on a developer for almost everything.

The request was a new website. What we delivered was a custom system: website, panel, database, AI and automations, all on Google Cloud, designed for Safetline's team to run on their own.

A technical catalog buyers actually understand

The product page was designed for the technical buyer. The visitor picks the material and the sole and the gallery instantly switches to the photos of that exact combination. Below it, the official pictogram of each standard (water resistance, electrical insulation, shock absorption) is rendered from the registered codes, with no one drawing icons.

Safetline does not sell online, so each product offers two paths: individuals request a contact and large orders open a direct factory quote in a pop-up, without leaving the page. Every request lands in the panel with its source page, even if the email notification fails.

A management panel built for marketing, not for developers

The heart of the project is a custom admin panel with more than 20 areas: products, variants, categories, product lines, technologies, news, home carousel, menu, institutional pages, redirects, leads and users with per-area permissions. Netlinks' copywriter, for example, only sees News and Media Library.

Each product has tabs for content, specifications, variants, images, combinations and SEO. Combinations are photo blocks linked to materials and soles: that is how the product page knows which image to show when the visitor changes the selection. Products and variants duplicate in one click, and changing a product URL creates the 301 automatically.

• Media library: every uploaded file is registered and can be reused anywhere.
• Security: the panel has its own entry address and locks access after repeated wrong passwords.
• Leads: quote, spec sheet, sales rep and contact forms arrive with date, source and product, filterable by period.
• Redirects: the team creates, pauses and edits 301s in the panel; the system refuses to redirect a live page.

3D models generated from product photos

3D-capturing a shoe usually requires a scanning studio. Here, Safetline's team uploads the studio photos already used on the site (45 degrees, profile, inside and heel), enters the real length and clicks Generate 3D. A few minutes later the model is ready, with an Android version and an iPhone version.

Behind the scenes, the panel spins up a GPU machine on Google Cloud, runs an AI 3D reconstruction model, scales it to the real size of the shoe and saves the files to the product. The machine shuts itself down after a few idle minutes, so each model costs cents and no expensive server sits waiting. On the product page, the View in 3D button opens the shoe to rotate, and on a phone it can be placed at real size through the camera, in augmented reality.

Models are born switched off: the team reviews the preview and only then turns on the toggle that publishes the button. Learn more about 3D product models.

Safy, the digital specialist who knows the catalog

The website chat is not a tree of canned answers. Safy is an AI chatbot that receives Safetline's live catalog (products, categories and technologies) in every conversation and answers like a technical salesperson: it understands the asker's job, recommends one to three items with a reason for each and leads to the right next step.

The rules are business rules, not technology rules. It never invents a product; when Safetline does not make what was asked for, it says so and suggests the closest alternative. Large orders go to the factory quote, single pairs go to the product page and educational questions go to the blog. The assistant's image, name and title are changed by the team in the panel.

Three languages, one catalog, and no Google scare at launch

Content is written once, in Portuguese. When a product, article, technology or category is saved, the system detects what changed and requests the English and Spanish translation right away, with AI configured to use minimal reasoning. Unchanged text is not translated again, so the bill does not grow with every save.

To protect rankings, we mapped all 627 URLs of the old WordPress sites and the store one by one, and every one redirects with a 301 to the equivalent page. Old files were copied and still respond. News articles got a Yoast-style editor with focus keyword, Google result preview and SEO and readability scores.

What changed for Safetline

The website went live on September 23, 2026, with the old store migrated too and no legacy URL ending in an error. Since then the marketing team publishes news, swaps banners, adds products and edits the menu without opening a ticket for a developer.

The platform kept evolving after launch, at the pace of Safetline's requests: article editor, sector controls, new institutional pages and the 3D generator. That is the OnWeb model: the software belongs to the company and grows with it month after month.

Frequently asked questions