Responses by Chris Walbert, strategy, Daniel Givens, lead developer and Michael McNeive, design director, Drexler

Background: For more than fifteen years, Ceremony Coffee Roasters has been sourcing, roasting and selling some of the country’s best coffee. We set out to communicate the brand in a way that is true to its history, create a compelling experience for the range of specialty coffee drinkers and visually depict each coffee in a way that communicates its particular tasting notes.

Highlights: From how we showcase each coffee’s unique flavors through unexpected photography to our Taste by Color experience, we want to help users think about and discover coffee in a different way. We utilized minimalism as a key driver of the aesthetic and stripped down the user interface to keep the focus on the products.

Challenges: To rethink the brand from a digital-first perspective. It had to feel like Ceremony, but in a way that propelled it into the future. To connect the main site and the online store, we had to get creative with how resources are shared across the two platforms to minimize the amount of upkeep needed on multiple codebases.

Favorite details: We chose to be very literal in the depicting of coffee flavors. While users don’t see the bag or beans, they visualize the specific flavors they are going to experience. We’re hopeful that it will help users who don’t consider themselves coffee experts find new coffees that match their preferences. With Taste by Color, users can explore tasting notes in a very unique way.

Anything new: Working with Shopify's Slate system to build the theme. Our design pushed the limits of what a product page can do and required us to build on top of the standard editor to make a template and set of custom fields that could work across three different product page templates.

Technical features: As part of our cross-platform approach, we needed to heavily modify Shopify product pages to allow users to quickly add products to their cart without navigating away from the page they were viewing. This AJAX mini-cart setup includes a lot of custom interaction that adds and removes items without leaving the page, whether it is being viewed on the Wordpress side or Shopify side.