Internal communication portal for 900+ employees

900+ employees across five countries, four languages, and a workforce split between office desks and production floors. When Felss needed to get critical information to everyone – fast – a traditional intranet wasn't going to cut it. I designed and built my.Felss: a mobile-first communication portal that started as a blog and grew into the company's daily entry point for internal news, documents, and updates.

The problem

Felss is a global manufacturing group, and their internal structure is complex – multiple business areas, locations on three continents, and a communications team that needed to reach everyone from engineers at their desks to operators on the shop floor. More than half the workforce had no computer workstation. Four languages, cultural differences, and the sudden pressure of a global crisis made the need for fast, reliable internal communication urgent.

What we built

The Felss marketing team and I took a phased approach. First, we shipped a blog within weeks – a fast, minimal channel to get essential crisis information to employees globally. Once that was stable, we expanded it into a full information portal with categorized news, a document download area, and internal communications features. Then we added native mobile apps with push notifications, so the comms team could reach colleagues directly on their phones.

How I built it

I knew from the start that the blog was just the first step – more features and more frontends were coming. So I chose a Headless CMS as the single content source, which let us develop the web portal and mobile apps independently while keeping content management in one place. The web portal was built with React and Next.js, the mobile apps with React Native and Expo. Push notifications ran through the Expo API, giving the comms team a direct line to every employee's pocket.

The result

my.Felss is now the daily entry point for all Felss employees. The portal works on desktop and mobile, and the app is installed on smartphones across every location. The key shift: for the first time, the company could reach its entire workforce – not just the people sitting at computers.

„The best thing is that we can now reach all of our colleagues, including the more than 50% of non-desk employees who never had access to our corporate content before."

– Hannah Bittigkoffer, Referent Marketing & Communications, Felss Group GmbH

Get in touch if you're planning to build something similar.