Hägglunds, a product brand within Bosch Rexroth had a problem most industrial manufacturers know well: motors too big to ship, products too complex to explain with a brochure, and trade fairs happening everywhere from São Paulo to Seoul. They needed one tool that could do what no physical exhibit could show: everything, anywhere, to anyone. Here's what happened when they built it.
The scale problem nobody talks about
Hägglunds designs and manufactures heavy-duty hydraulic drive systems used across some of the world's most demanding industries, such as mining, marine, paper, metals, and more. The motors are large, the applications are diverse, and the technical depth required to explain them to a customer is significant.
The physical demo model worked fine when you had the right product, in the right place, with the right expert. But as a scalable commercial tool, it had clear limits.
"Since our motors are so big, it was hard to fit them all in the physical showroom, and to be able to transport them to different trade shows and fairs, it was just impossible." /Amanda Bergström, Global Brand Manager, Hägglunds
Hägglunds participates in fairs across four continents. Each one requires preparation, logistics, and product selection. The harder question how do you show a customer a product that isn't there? Just did not had no good answer.
What they were trying to solve
The challenge wasn't just logistical. It was about the quality and consistency of the sales conversation itself.
Hägglunds' products don't sell themselves in one sentence. A customer needs to understand not just what the motor does, but where it fits in their specific application, a ball mill, a conveyor, a marine winch, a shredder, and why the Hägglunds solution changes the equation. That conversation requires context. It requires visuals. And it requires the ability to go deep on specifics without losing the thread.
The sales team at Hägglunds wanted a tool that would let them do exactly that, whether they were standing at a booth in Düsseldorf or sitting across a table from a mining engineer in Chile.
The solution: an interactive digital showroom
3ngage built Hägglunds an interactive product experience with two primary components.
The first was a digital mining world, a 3D environment where customers could explore different mining applications and see how Hägglunds products operated within each one. This gave the sales team a visual starting point for almost any mining conversation, without needing the physical product present.
The second was a detailed, interactive product experience for the Hägglunds Thunder, a direct-drive solution for high-torque, low-speed applications. This allowed the sales team to walk a customer through specific performance characteristics, operational modes, and technical advantages in a controlled and visually intuitive way.
The experience runs in an iOS app and can be demonstrated on devices that support iOS apps.
What the sales team observed
The feedback from the Hägglunds sales team after using the tool at a trade fair was direct. The interactive demo worked as a conversation starter; visitors engaged with it, it created context, and it opened up discussions that might otherwise have been harder to get into.
Some specific improvements emerged from the review. The team identified that the tool could better highlight one of Thunder's most commercially significant features, so the first implementation was adjusted accordingly.
The team also noted that the experience could do more at the fair itself. Right now, the tool is used by salespeople as a conversation aid. The opportunity is to let visitors use it independently with an attract loop when no one is interacting, lead capture built into the flow, and a QR code that lets visitors take the experience with them when they leave the booth.
That shift matters. If a booth has 500 visitors over three days and two salespeople using the tool, the number of meaningful interactions is limited by the number of conversations those two salespeople can have. An experience that visitors can use themselves and share changes the math.
What's next
Hägglunds is expanding the platform. The next phase includes additional product lines beyond Thunder, new industry applications, and coverage of specific installations that can be used as reference cases at upcoming fairs.
There is also a recycling-industry version available now for a separate event, and ongoing conversations about how the tool can be used before fairs in outreach campaigns and after fairs as a follow-up resource.
The mining world experience started as a way to solve a logistics problem. It's becoming an infrastructure layer for how Hägglunds presents, demonstrates, and follows up across their global commercial operation.
See what this looks like for your product portfolio
If you have a product line that's hard to transport, hard to explain without context, or hard to demonstrate consistently across regions and channels, book a 30-minute call. We'll show you the Hägglunds experience live and discuss what a similar approach would look like for you.