The Ruby’s Farmhouse Boutique store is finally LIVE! For this post, I thought I would give you a glimpse into the way we approached one of our projects.
This was a fun project to take on, a creative style we haven’t experimented with much. Ruby’s Farmhouse Boutique is an online store for retro kitchen and home items. Most of the products are reproductions from the 1940s and 1950s era.
The client needed a logo and fully functioning web store for a large inventory of products….all just before Christmas. Yikes! The store is a brand new startup, so we had a blank slate to work from. But everything needed to convey the personality and appeal of a classic retro coolness. Now, I am not one of those cool retro loving types, and I don’t wear girly aprons very much. So this was a little bit of a stretch outside my creative comfort zone - but we’re always up for a good challenge.
We started with the logo and color palette. After playing with several different concepts we selected one with cherries and red, turquoise, blue, and green palette. Cherries were chosen as the central graphic element because of their broad appeal. We wanted this site to connect with an older audience that appreciate the nostalgic value of these authentic reproductions, as well as younger hipsters that just like anything “retro”. We wanted something cool, but not too cool. Cherries fit the bill. Everyone loves cherries.
Once the logo was developed, we incorporated a tag line for the client - “Homemaking for the Retro Enthusiast.” With a little bit of typographic styling and a cute little icon - Viola, we have another element to incorporate into the branding. This tag line was used on the back of the business cards, hang tags, and on top of the web site as a quick identifier of what Ruby’s is.
Then we moved on the programming-intensive, technology-driven part of the project. We harnessed the powerful Magento software to create a custom store that operates within the structure of the Ruby’s website. With many online stores, the store software takes the user away from the main site to it’s own inventory and processing pages. Although it was a ton of work, we were able to customize the store to retain a consistent look throughout.
The store features an inventory of over 200 products. It manages the inventory completely, calculates shipping and sales tax, provides processing for transactions, and allows total management of the sales and shipping process. It also has a customer database system and newsletter feature.
As an extra service, I was able to train the client to use the store software on her own to make needed updates to the inventory.
This was a bear of a project. The creative side was definitely a blast, but the programming side required a bit of mind bending effort. We learned sooo much from the this project. It was finished just in time for Christmas sales, and has been extremely successful so far, logging sales from across the country.