M01post-relaunch
+62%
E-commerce conversion
Case · Vegan Town
Brand & Web · 2023
A grocery brand that earns its category, not its category's clichés.
Vegan Town is a small but ambitious plant-based grocery operator with a serious product line and an identity that was actively undermining it — green leaves, sans-serif friendliness, the entire visual vocabulary of the segment they were trying to outgrow.
fig. 01 — vegan town · brand & web · 2023
01
The brief
Context, constraint, and the part that mattered.
The brief was a brand and digital relaunch that would let them pitch to retail buyers and serve direct customers without flattening the catalogue into a sea of identical wellness signifiers. We pushed in the opposite direction of the category: a typographic system built on a strong serif, a controlled color palette dominated by deep paper tones rather than greens, photography direction that treated the products as ingredients rather than lifestyle props. The website was rebuilt as an editorial commerce surface — readable product pages, a recipe section that earns its place, a checkout that actually closes. The result reads premium without performing premium, which is the trade the founders had been trying to articulate for two years and could not find a partner to execute.
02
Approach
What we did, in the order we did it.
- 01
Earning the category, not signalling it
The core decision was to refuse the visual shortcuts of the segment — leaf marks, gradient greens, hand-drawn ingredient illustrations. Instead, the system anchors on a strong serif, a controlled palette of paper neutrals and one deep accent, and product photography that treats food as composition rather than as a lifestyle prop. The brand reads as serious enough to belong in a real grocery aisle.
- 02
An editorial commerce surface
The site is a Next.js front end on top of a headless commerce stack. Product pages are designed to be read, not just scanned: ingredient stories sit alongside the buy-box, and the recipe section is woven into the catalogue rather than quarantined to a /blog. Checkout is a single page with a single decision per row, which is the only meaningful conversion lever in DTC food and was treated accordingly.
- 03
A system the team can operate
Every brand primitive — type, color, spacing, photography direction — is documented in a 22-page operations guide written for a marketing team of two. The system is intentionally small enough to memorise. The founders update the site themselves and have not asked us to do so since handover.
03
Selected artifacts
A small spread from the engagement.
fig. 02 — artifact 1
fig. 03 — artifact 2
fig. 04 — artifact 3
fig. 05 — artifact 4
fig. 06 — artifact 5
04
Outcome
The numbers we agreed to ship against.
M02in the first quarter
4.1×
Wholesale inquiries
M03directly attributed to the new identity
2
Retail partnerships
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