Lemonade Shopify Website

This is the story of how we took a website with no mobile website or online ordering option to having $9k in online sales in there first month.

Lemonade Gluten Free Bakery is a dedicated Celiac Friendly Gluten Free Bakery based in Vancouver B.C. Owner and head pastry chef, Tracy Kadonoff open the bakery on August 11, 2012. After close to twenty years of working with gluten-based flours, Tracy developed a gluten intolerance and could no longer eat or work around gluten. Seeking out alternative breads and pastries to include in her new diet, the idea for Lemonade was born. When life gives you lemons, make Lemonade!

Problem:
Lemonade Gluten Free Bakery is a well-established Vancouver business with a strong customer base, myself included! After moving back into the city in 2021, I was excited to start shopping at my favourite bakery again. But I was disappointed to find their website was not mobile-friendly, and they had no way to order online. But my disappointment turned to inspiration when I realized I could fix all these issues. I reached out to Tracey via email and was thrilled when she responded and was excited to work with me too!

Solution:
Make a new website on the Shopify platform so it will be mobile-friendly and allow for online orders. Update the company name branding, and take new product photos of everything they offer.

BEFORE

The old website was desktop only and very text heavy. Our goal with the new website was to make everything more visually appealing while still displaying important details like all the dietary restrictions.

NAME BRANDING

Lemonade Gluten Free Bakery is well established but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t benefit from name branding consolidation. When name branding, it is best to make sure that your email address has all the information about your company. Your name, website, social media handle and, of course, email. The original website and email was lemonadbakery.ca which did not match the social media handles. We updated everything to lemonadeglutenfreebakery.ca to make the name branding cohesive. And to improve SEO when people are looking for Gluten Free Bakeries.

THEME ANALYSIS

My goal with this project was not to reinvent the wheel but to expand the brand into a new platform. I showed Tracy 3 Shopify themes, but there was a clear choice for which theme would work with the current branding. We started development with the Express – Bistro theme.

VERSION 1

A few weeks into the development process, we realized the original theme we picked Express – Bistro was not going to meet all our functionality needs. We realized after doing some user testing that we wanted to have more detailed product descriptions, and we wanted to place strict rules on how much of a product could be checked out at one time. Luckily this was early enough into development that we could reuse a lot of the code in the new theme. And with minimal effort, we were able to transition to a new theme, Fresh.
The below image is the Express – Bistro site before we moved to a new theme.

MOCKUPS

Transitioning to a new theme was definitely the best choice. It allowed us to be far more detailed with our products and implement a better workflow and functionality. It also gave us new places to include and expand the branding.
The below image is the Fresh site before launch.

CONTENT PLANNING

Transitioning to the new theme meant we had to do a lot of extra content planning. We had to create collections of products that were taxed and not taxed, and we created groups with specific order parameters for different products. For example, you can only order a max of 12 cupcakes at a time, but it can be any combination of the five flavours, as long as the max is 12. Many of the products required special groupings like this. But thanks to Shopify and Shopify apps, we were able to implement all of this without having to write a bunch of custom code.

WEBSITE

After months of development and many detail-oriented updates, we finally had the website ready to launch! After a small beta test with family and friends, we publicly launched lemonadeglutenfreebakery.ca on November 8, 2021. By November 30, 2021, lemonadeglutenfreebakery.ca had over $9k in online orders! Clearly, there was a demand for an online ordering option! And the business has only continued to grow with an average of $7k a month in online sales. This local business is thriving!

VIEW THE LIVE SITE
PROJECT COMPLETED: NOVEMBER 2021

WHAT THE CLIENT HAD TO SAY

Kelsey contacted me about a new website, a much-needed new website for my bakery. I knew I wanted to upgrade our website for an easier way for online ordering, but I really had no idea what we needed to do or how to go about it. Kelsey had great ideas and made me realize that this was something I needed. Someone who specializes in website development to take on, as I am definitely not tech savvy. There were so many variables with the new site, taxed or no taxed items, limited numbers available for order, many different dietary restrictions to put in place, items available only seasonally etc. Kelsey kept her cool throughout the process and came up with perfect solutions to all the issues with a menu that has so many variables. I love the new website! It is so much more than I imagined it could be. Very grateful to Kelsey for the amazing job she did and continues to do for Lemonade.

TRACY KADONOFF
Owner (Lemonade Gluten Free Bakery)

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