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Web & Graphic Design
- kariekirkpatrick@gmail.com
Web & Graphic Design
Project Date:
Website launched in the Summer of 2021
Overview:
Cascadia Mushrooms is an organic mushroom farm in the Pacific Northwest. They sell fresh mushrooms at local farmers markets, restaurants, and grocery stores throughout Western Washington. They also sell grow-at-home kits and similar products through their website.
My contributions:
Brand style guide, competitor research, wireframes and mockups, final web and UI designs, website build in Shopify, blog writing, email marketing setup, email drip campaigns and newsletters, contribution to product photography along with another photographer.
The Problem:
Cascadia had a few issues they were facing. First, they had outgrown their website and matured as a brand. Second, they were ready to grow their eCommerce sales, which hadn’t been a focus of theirs previously. They didn’t have much for sales and their customer retention was very low. And third, their site wasn’t mobile-friendly.
Objective:
Create a mobile-optimized e-commerce site with an updated look and feel that suits the maturation of the brand. Increase organic traffic and sales to their online store. Improve customer retention.
Solution:
A responsive website with clear navigation, updated branding, and tweaks to the overall user experience. As their products involve a lot of education, an informative blog was necessary to provide value to their audience as well as bring in organic traffic.
This project included product photography, a brand style guide, website design and migration, content marketing, and an email marketing system.
Tools used:
Adobe XD, Photoshop, Illustrator; Klaviyo Email Marketing Software; Shopify
Initial project research included competitor & SWOT analyses, user personas, review mining, and raking through data from Google Analytics and SEMrush. Some of the key findings included:
I put together a UI kit to establish the basic branding guidelines for Cascadia Mushrooms.
I worked off their existing main brand color, a golden hue reminiscent of chanterelle mushrooms. Accent colors include a dark but soft mossy green and light khaki (based off the gills of the oyster mushroom), to add to the forest allusion. Most text is a dark charcoal to provide a strong contrast for accessibility.
Buttons are clean, simple, and sharp. Website background is pure white with lots of white space. Overall design is minimal, modern, simple, and clean. All text outside of main headings are Lato, well known for being an easy-to-read web font. This style moves them away from the “groovy” psychedelic style that so often accompanies mushroom companies.
Cascadia is a professional business that runs a perfectly hygienic farm and maintains great relationships throughout their community of fellow farmers, grocery stores, restaurant owners, and chefs. The new design was chosen to reflect their business more appropriately.
My work for Cascadia has included product and lifestyle photography to highlight the beauty of their fresh, organic mushrooms. The new images help to inspire a desire to grow mushrooms at home and give the user a feast for the eyes.
The brand had matured since their original website was built, and online shopping was a different world than it was when they first started selling mushroom grow kits. The previous website wasn’t mobile responsive, had an outdated look, and the product photos were small, low-resolution shots that were tough to see.
The first step was to get new product photography with clear, high-resolution images*. The new shop page was built to be easy to navigate with a simple side filter. Product badges easily highlight was is new, on sale, or sold out. Star ratings show social proof.
The shop pages have a callout below the products that speaks to one of their main value propositions – they’re one of the only organic mushroom farms in the US.
*Some of the product photos on the new site are by another photographer
Cascadia only has one person answering customer service questions – and people growing mushrooms have a lot of questions. Adding helpful content to the website and making this information easy to find on product and collection pages has helped Cascadia to save tons of time.
Cascadia’s site sees twice as many mobile visitors as desktop users, so it was super important that the site looks good and functions well on a small screen.
The redesigned site shows Cascadia’s authority as mycology experts and is full of valuable information to help their customers be more successful in growing mushrooms, while giving them more reason and incentive to return.
Additional tasks I’ve done on this project include email marketing strategy, integrating a rewards program, setting up bulk discounts, a reviews app, and SEO-optimized content marketing.
After the new site was launched, Cascadia Mushroom’s revenue has seen a 4x increase month over month, their customer retention is up, they’re ranking for 15+% more keywords, and organic traffic more than doubled.
4x increase in MoM revenue
42% increase in email signups
60% increase in organic traffic
