A unique winery issues a design and development challenge
At 3225 Boucherie Road, West Kelowna, BC, there resides an incredibly unique winery, the hatch. With stunning vistas out over Okanagan Lake, the winery’s eclectic mix of quirky eccentrism seems to work a treat when paired with its highly rated vino. The hatch wines are stocked at retailers across Canada, and it has built a reputation for consistently delivering quality, and of course, copious amounts of brand appeal, heavily inspired by the illustrations of narrative artist Paul Morstad.
For these reasons, everything that is the hatch is wildly popular. Able Sense had the exciting opportunity to design and create a refreshed ecommerce presence that would stay true to the unmistakably distinctive character of the hatch. We did just that.
Services
- Design
- Development
- Ecommerce
- Shopify Plus
- POS Implementation
- Wine Club
- Ecommerce Action Plan
Hatching a brilliant plan
The hatch team had been struggling with issues with their previous (extremely slow-loading) website and non-integrated POS system and were ready to migrate to an efficient, effective and seamless Shopify platform and POS.
The goal of their personalized Ecommerce Action Plan was to offer their customers a better online shopping experience with Shopify and in the hatch retail store at the winery. We integrated their separate, complicated wine club and inventory tracking apps into the overall system to bring operational efficiencies to both management and staff. And, by making it easier to place and receive orders with Shopify, and decreasing issues with their POS, the business can now continue to grow without technical obstacles from more software systems than necessary.
An intelligent design
The client liked the humorous, eclectic style they already had, and so did we. They asked us to keep the overall look and feel of their previous site, but challenged us to enhance their visual brand and reduce loading time. They also asked for an easy-to-update homepage that lets them change out content, images and featured products.
Staying true to a singularly unique brand
The hatch team identifies their brand style as “1880’s American carnival/pioneer spirit/hobo chic/hobo dynasty/1930’s tramps”. Our designer, Erin, took this in stride and enhanced their distinctive brand by carrying many of the elements from their old site over to the new design, for a refreshed look and feel.
We used the hatch logo as inspiration for an official colour palette for the site, to improve cohesiveness and impact throughout. The parchment background texture, which was a very prominent feature of their previous website, was kept as an element but improved, reusing the texture as a single image rather than a repeated pattern.
As well, their characteristic heading font, Special Elite, had originally been used for all text, making their content a challenge to read. We introduced Courier for the body and supporting text, which increased the legibility of their content and echoed their 1880’s-typewriter style.
Distinctive development
Our developer, Derek, collaborated to create a responsive layout that works on any screen size and on any device.
We used Shopify sections expertly to create customizable collection filters that can be easily updated and maintained by the hatch staff.
We integrated a multi-tiered wine club using the Bold Subscriptions app to replace the external wine club app, improving usability for customers and staff.
We created custom page templates for The Awards and The Reviews, pages with complex layouts that are now content-manageable for the hatch team.
Our developers worked behind the scenes to ensure that “The Locator” from Secomapp integrated perfectly in their platform, to showcase the distributors of the hatch products.
An unconventional success
Although we’re still not completely clear about why the hatch is named “the hatch”, we’re proud to say that we met their initial goals of stronger branding throughout their new ecommerce platform, putting everything all in one place, a drastically-reduced loading time and an efficient POS. Our designer and developers are proud of the challenges they overcame and the design and coding wrongs they righted, and we’re looking forward to more quirkily fun updates from the hatch team as their brand continues to grow.
