eCommerce Website Design for Key to Teas
Project Description
eCommerce Website Design for Startup Tea Company
Key To Teas is a tea company built upon the personal story and expertise of Naoko Tsunoda after working in the specialty food and beverage industry for 20 years. Naoko spent her youth in Japan, learning the depth and tradition that came along with drinking tea. After returning to the United States, she missed her tea rituals and sought to share her passion for it by starting her own business.
Project Objectives
As a new venture, Key to Teas did not have a website, so we were excited to partner with them from the ground up. The goal is to allow users to learn more about the tea and truly Naoko’s passion and commitment to her work while also being a mother of three.
Website Design Choices
We wanted the beautiful tea mixes to really shine on the site, so we kept the color palette clean and neutral. Clean lines and offset imagery are used as accents but ultimately the star of the site is the beautiful teas.
Along with the teas themselves, we used some beautiful lifestyle imagery to share Naoko’s story, as well as entice users with a stunning mix of steeped tea and the herbs, leaves, and flowers that make up each mix. We designed a lot of space for images such as these throughout the site. There are a few designed elements like the stylized icons used throughout the site for subscription information, as well as the portion highlighting the social responsibility Naoko and Key to Teas takes.
Custom eCommerce Functionality
Along with the build on BigCommerce and FusionCMS, there was some custom functionality used to take this site to the next level.
The first is implementing a custom tea quiz for users to find out what their tea personality is. With a number of fun and thoughtful questions, the quiz determines what type of tea drinker you are, and recommends a few at the end that you may be interested in.
The site also has a subscription feature, powered by Bold. Users simply choose their frequency, tea profile, and can have tea boxes shipped directly to their house, allowing them to try new teas as well as enjoy more of their favorites on a regular basis.
Unique eCommerce Product Pages
With a focus on quality and product, it was important that the product pages were informative and helpful to users. Each tea page begins as one usually would, with a photo of the product and a short description. As a user scrolls, though, they are presented with history about the specific tea, as well as features a custom origin map sharing where the tea originated from. The page then goes on, using icons to show steeping instructions, ingredients, and caffeine levels. At the bottom of the page, we included similar teas in a section called “Brews Well With”
It was truly a joy for our team to partner with Naoko as her passion for tea is evident. We are excited to see this business come to life and we cannot wait to see how much they continue to grow.