Short Stories Digital Campaign

Square Mile Coffee Roasters and I have worked together on a number of creative projects including a festive illustration for seasonal merchandise and website design/development for a machinery sales side project. Recently the client invited me to work with them again, this time devising the third instalment of their Short Stories online campaign. Each year the client runs a course of digital marketing to promote and sell limited edition lots of coffee sourced from around the world. This year the campaign was focused on the Huila region of Columbia.

Series three of Short Stories was set to be more technically ambitious than those previously run. Sales of each of the three coffee flavours would be made available to users incrementally during the campaign to intensify individual product sales. I proposed the concept of building a timeline that allowed users to move through each of the product pages in a "teaser" state from the very launch of the campaign. These pages would be coded flexibly to include and withhold sales content conditionally as dictated by an admin control panel I'd also build for the Client. By logging into the system the Client could progress (or regress) the status of the campaign to trigger the 'active' or 'on sale' state of a chosen coffee and in turn trigger the 'sold out' state of its predecessor. Additionally the homepage to the site would also update to carry promotion of the active coffee. A close-down state would also be triggered once all the coffee had sold, which was the campaign objective.

The Client uses Shopify as their commerce platform and one of its most impressive features is its remote purchase integration. Through a simple script I was able to implement purchase buttons to the microsite that appended chosen coffees to a non-intrusive sidebar shopping cart, and allow users to checkout via a pay gate widget without having to leave the site. This ensured reduced friction in the conversion process.
Stylistically I took design cues from the Square Mile Coffee Roasters website which is very clean and modular, with brand enforcing font and a strong photo focus. The Client did an amazing job supplying me with primary-source photography of the three Huila coffee farms, which strengthened the resulting webpage designs and kept the campaign on brand. I kept the page layouts simple so that not only were the pages attractive to view and easy to engage with, but the completed site was adequately responsive across various devices and viewports.
I really enjoyed constructing this integral piece of the Client's digital marketing campaign. It demonstrates an effective balance of user-friendly front-end design and robust back-end development. It's a pivotal product in the campaign flow alongside concurrent social media and email activity that funnels users towards conversion. The Client is hopeful that this year's edition of Short Stories outperforms previous years - I am confident that it will.