Responses by Juan Luna and Sebastián Vélez, cofounders, Contra Studio.

Background: We created this e-commerce website for Ora The Floral Agency, a company based in Bogotá, Colombia, that creates products using a wide variety of flowers as well as workshops and other services. All of its work is created around flowers—their aroma, textures and colors—so we wanted to translate these ideas into a digital environment, communicating the brand experience and the level of detail in its craft on the website. Also, it is a place where customers can purchase Ora’s products in a personalized way.

Design core: In each moment of the experience, we tried to communicate the feeling and care that the people behind Ora have when creating each product. For example, we implemented details and interactions that hopefully would make all the users interested and fascinated by the brand. Of course, flowers are a fundamental element present on all pages. Also, all the photographs and videos were very carefully selected. Finally, we tried to use subtle interactions that accompany the experience at all times, such as hovers and scrolling animations.

Challenges: Being the first time we created a Shopify template, our workflow was a bit difficult to organize at first in a way that was comfortable for everyone in the team, as well for our clients. Also, we decided to create many pages from scratch with our own styles, transitions and typefaces, among others. Combining these pages with the regular e-commerce user journey was very challenging. We took a long time to take care of every detail, such as the location of the flowers, the selection of photographs and the typeface. It was overwhelming at times, but in the end, it was satisfying to see such a well-crafted website.

New lessons: For us as a newcomer digital studio, each project presents a new opportunity to learn things that help us make new projects interesting and efficient. In the case of Ora, we learned to consolidate the styles and functionalities of the components so that they could be reusable at other times on the website instead of creating new ones depending on the content of each page. It is a lesson we are trying to apply to our current projects. Our challenge now is to create an efficient workflow without losing creativity, details, interactions and the care that we want to show in each of our projects.

Technology: The website is built in Shopify. Therefore, we used ThemeKit and the Liquid template language to create all the custom pages that communicate Ora’s brand and services. For all the interactions and animation details on the site, we used GSAP—as always.

Anything else? We also want to thank Camila Melo, who helped us throughout the development process.