Web design, development & photography for a North Devon based company...
Meet Evie Kay Skincare
A fantastic local company making artisan soaps and other handmade skincare products all inspired by the beauty of North Devon. They tell their story through the eyes of the elusive, Evie Kay - a woman who, in the words of their website:
"Evie only ever came on holiday to North Devon. It became a very special place for her, an exciting place, a magical placeā¦ a transformative place. North Devon is where Evie ācame aliveā."
This beautiful story behind the brand really encapsulates what it means to live in Devon and sells to customers not only an amazing product, but the 'green prescription' experienced every day in this wonderful corner of the world.
Read about the intricacies of the project below:
The brief for the project was quite simple, build an online shop that showcases Evie Kay products better and also shows off the beauty of nature and the colours surrounding it. The idea is we needed to capture the luxury and professional edge of the products without sacrificing the story and the fact that every single product is completely hand-made.
We started our process by looking at the pain points of the old website, what was going wrong with it and what needed to be updated?
Although the website had a clean design with its colours, there were a lot of issues, mainly to do with how the websites functions had aged over time. We encountered a lot of errors and display issues that stopped the website giving its users that clean and easy experience that the modern web user has come to expect, issues with device scaling, links overlapping, font-inconsistency, lack of SEO work overtime and more.
Another issue and pain point identified, was that of the storytelling aspect. Although the copy was great, the imagery and layout of the website neither conveyed the quality of the brand nor Evie Kay's story, something identified that needed to change in the new design.
With that, we began work. Keeping with the constraints of the budget, we decided to opt to use Shopify as the back-end platform. Not only does this platform make development quick by handling all of the shop, payment and inventory systems, it also is incredibly customisable and SEO focused allowing you to build a site that serves its purpose well for a small, but growing brand like Evie Kay.
Our developers worked with the Evie Kay team to pick out a baseline template and then we fully customised and hand-coded the design, changing the features and functionality to give you what we ended up with and what's live today.
Below is a video giving a brief tour of the new website.
Next, we focused on imagery. Shooting in our in-house studio, we created a set of high-quality and web-optimised images that showed the beautiful craftsmanship that went into the handmade products, but also how luxury they were. We chose 3 angles, one of the box and the product, one of just the box and then one of the product held inside. This gave a nice, array of detailed images that showed off the product perfectly.
What next?
Now the website has been finished and made live, the next step is to introduce a digital marketing strategy for Evie Kay. Having never really delved into social media and the strategy behind it, Barr Media is in the phase of helping Evie Kay move forward with social media marketing with plans for content, videos and more.
The next phase for the website is to introduce some videography and more lifestyle content to give the users a more definitive idea of North Devon and the demographic the brand's products are aimed at.
In addition, with new products and a men's range on the horizon, it's exciting times for this local brand in Bideford and Barnstaple.
Check out their new website here and don't forget to say "hi":