- Rebrand
- Migration
- Design + UX
- Shopify Plus
Sarah Raven is the authoritative voice in UK horticulture, supplying a curated selection of seeds, plants, and advice from Perch Hill Farm directly to consumers. However, its legacy digital architecture failed to capture the visual warmth of the brand or properly handle the immense complexity of its seasonal catalogue.
The Challenge
The legacy infrastructure on BigCommerce had become an operational bottleneck and a commercial constraint. A high TCO was compounded by a rigid tech stack that stifled creative freedom, while an outdated UI/UX made product discovery difficult across disparate categories. With an upcoming contract renewal deadline, we had a strict six-month window to launch a new brand and complete the platform migration to Shopify Plus without disrupting active trading.
The Strategic Objectives
Success required executing a seamless platform migration of historical product, customer, and order data to Shopify Plus. Simultaneously, the internal Sarah Raven team managed a business-critical transition of their WMS to Mintsoft. Commercially, the goals—supported by the organic marketing specialists at NOVOS—were to eliminate search friction, safeguard existing search equity during the cutover, elevate Core Web Vitals, improve schema for LLM discoverability, and launch a refreshed visual identity that projected organic warmth and confidence.
Our Approach & Solution
We designed an editorial house style that marks a significant visual transformation, introducing a completely new logotype, typography framework, and colour palette. While the brand’s authentic tone of voice remains consistent, the new visual identity is noticeably warmer and more confident—properly matching Sarah Raven’s position as the authoritative voice in UK horticulture. It captures an aesthetic that is effortless and understated, yet inherently distinct.
The user interface utilises a structured grid layout that balances clean, ordered commercial sections with moments of visual storytelling. The typographic system pairs Otto by Dinamo with Aperçu by Colophon Foundry, set against a rich, earthy palette featuring house colour names like Rich Mulch, Aged Terracotta, and Deep Lichen. To ensure absolute usability for a varied audience demographic, we stripped out ambiguous iconography entirely, relying on clean, text-based UI and subtle, hand-drawn lines to inject human warmth.
Technical Architecture
Built completely from scratch without base themes or boilerplates, the storefront uses a lightweight architecture built for performance through a combination of TailwindCSS and custom web components.
Managing intricate product metadata required a sophisticated migration framework via Migration Pro and Matrixify, leveraging Shopify’s native metaobjects and metafields to render complex metadata, including planting and flowering calendars.
The architecture natively handles distinct fulfilment logic across plants, seeds, and gardening courses, communicating cleanly with the backend stack, while search and discovery is integrated directly via the Tagalys API to help minimise technical debt.
Using Shopify’s Theme Blocks, we built a modular component library that gives the internal team absolute content autonomy to manage updates independently and with complete flexibility.
The Transformation
We delivered a comprehensive brand and platform transformation on time and on budget. The new flagship website marries robust backend engineering with a warm and approachable storefront, moving the business away from restrictive legacy software while aligning smoothly with the internal team's concurrent Mintsoft rollout. The outcome is a future-proof foundation built for sustained D2C scale, allowing the internal team to manage seasonal content changes seamlessly while drastically reducing cognitive load for their customers.
Commercial Impact & Metrics
The architecture was engineered for long-term commercial resilience, protecting active revenue streams throughout a complex data transition. Working closely with NOVOS on the technical SEO migration strategy ensured that historical authority was fully preserved, while drastic reductions in page weight delivered an immediate lift in Core Web Vitals and organic search indexability. The demographic-first UI/UX has enhanced accessibility, while clean navigation paths streamlined cross-category discovery, lowering cart abandonment and ensuring maximum brand discoverability within emerging search and AI models.
