Eighty percent wholesale,
twenty percent retail, one compromised site.
Art of Tea sources from the top two percent of tea globally and sells to high-end cafes, hotels and restaurants alongside a growing direct channel. Two fundamentally different buyers were being served by a single Magento experience that suited neither.
The situation,as it arrived.
Magento 1.x had reached end of life, which made it a security and operational risk with no clear upgrade path. The mobile experience was functionally broken. Search was unreliable across more than a hundred SKUs sold in six formats. Years of backend workarounds had made routine updates painful for the internal team.
Underneath the platform problem sat an architectural one. Wholesale is eighty percent of revenue and retail is twenty, and neither could be treated as secondary — but one theme serving both was compromising both.
Four moves,in the order they happened.
Decide the architecture before the design
Two fully separate Shopify Plus sites, each with its own repository and its own theme: one built for trade buyers managing ongoing relationships, one for consumers discovering the brand. The 80/20 split made a single compromised experience indefensible.
A custom theme rather than an adapted one
Vue.js with Vuex for reactive state, compiled with Webpack — a level of interactivity and polish an off-the-shelf theme cannot reach, on a modular content structure the internal team can actually operate.
Fix search properly
Algolia InstantSearch across collection and search pages, returning real-time results without page reloads. With 100+ SKUs in multiple formats, accurate search is the difference between discovery and a bounce, particularly for wholesale buyers placing large orders.
Mobile first, and the editorial the brand deserved
A UX analysis grounded in site data and stakeholder input, then a design that leads with lifestyle imagery into product, in bite-sized modules. Navigation streamlined for first-time visitors while the deep educational content stayed for engaged ones.
Everything thatleft the building.
- Two separate Shopify Plus builds, retail and wholesale
- Custom Vue.js theme on Webpack
- Algolia InstantSearch integration
- Magento to Shopify Plus migration
- Mobile-first UX and design system
- Brand storytelling and product content
- Customer record migration
- Quality assurance across both sites
More like this one.One a month.
Written out of engagements rather than off a content calendar, by whichever principal ran the work. No sequence afterwards.
Your situation is not this one.Tell us what it is.
A senior strategist reads it and replies within one business day, with a straight answer about whether we are the right people.