Co-Web Design
Shopify Development
Custom Features
App integrations
2019-2023
Grape
Witches
Grape Witches are Toronto's natural wine darlings & favourite educators with an impactful Imports arm that brings the wines of some of the world's top producers to shops & restaurants across Ontario. Their site now brings together their wine shop, education hours, events, Wine Club, and GW Imports in one place ++ a special Let Us Choose option & backend Wine Club onboarding system that saves their staff tons of time by syncing to Notion. They continue to grow in size, impact, staff every year! I worked closely with Nicole & the GW team from their first Squarespace site featuring stickers painted & scanned (!!) by Laura Dawe through a very custom Shopify build and follow-on features.
grapewitches.com
part of their world
One of my favourite features on the GW site is the section profiling what’s happening now. Having worked with Nicole for years prior to this build,I knew that GW always had a million things going on,from new Imports releases, parties, Education Hours, collaborations, Try & Buy, new menus, locations & pop-ups to Let us Choose and Wine Club. So how could we create a home for these myriad things without pushing people into the navigation where it wouldn’t really capture how alive their world was or what was current? This feature not only gives people a sense of what’s going on at a glance & lets them quickly find what they probably came to the shop for, it’s also an opportunity for discovery, like oh I didn’t know about xyz thing. AND it makes us feel like we’re part of their world. This continues with the Staff picks section where we can get to know their people and likely align with a few of them on taste.
FINDABILITY meets DISCOVERABILITY
GW has a massive catalogue, so there are a few layered features, including search, prominent in the header, that make it easy to both find what you want & discover new things. There are multiple starting points in the navigation. And once on a collection page, there’s a sticky sub-nav for primary categories. Below the intro, serving up some lite education, are the wines. We developed the ability to see up to 8 wines per row on desktop, scanning wines the way you would in a shop. Wines have a lot of names people can’t remember so the visual of the bottle is most important at this stage of the decision-making process. You can see the wines ordered by price or what’s newest, alphabetically. The filters are where you start to really reduce options quickly. It’s also a way to think about what you’re looking for in new ways & explore the catalogue, again b/c most of us don’t have the best vocabulary for wine, their language is key.
you know it’s gw
Enter: the badges. One of the best GW inventions that runs between the site &&& the IRL shops with bottle hangers. They have influenced how we all talk about wine and made wine incredibly accessible & fun. There’s no industry jargon. So we created a row where the badges could be showcased & when hovered over or tapped, revealed a description; a lot of info is packed into that row + it’s fun to explore. The system has actually only grown since we first did the site. We also included a headline for the wine: “Fresh Squeezed Bojo!” And followed this with grape & region details, and the description. Again, knowing the team well, I knew these were never going to be short, in the best possible way — so we have a “Read more” function. The rest is quite simple, if only for the sake of the team keeping up with the volume of product added each week.
LET US CHOOSE
Another super unique invention from the team. Piggybacking off not only the enormous trust people have in the brand (which is to say, the PEOPLE) & the challenges customers have deciding what wine to get, GW offers a LET US CHOOSE option. This one required a v custom build. It’s a fun and fast experience to fill out what’s essentially a form with only three questions. You feel like someone is guiding you through it — you’re not trying to come up with some description of what you want, but are also able to set some parameters, like yes I do like”Unhinged freaky fun” and I only have $100. All details go into the cart for someone to see their choice reflected back before purchasing. It’s popular!
I can't overstate how wonderful it has been to work with Amy. She spent time to understand our needs & vision and made us a beautiful, incredibly functional site that allowed us to take our business to the next level and has been there every step of the way — from Squarespace at the very beginning through our custom Shopify site. It's so rare and wonderful to work with someone who spends the time to 'get' your brand, so that you don't need to be checking over their work and course correcting constantly. Besides her extreme competency, she is truly a joy to work with interpersonally. Kind, funny and smart. A true star! I've referred her to countless other local businesses who have all raved about her.
— NICOLE CAMPBELL, CO-FOUNDER & DIRECTOR OF GRAPE WITCHES
