Ashvale Farm Shop — Case Study

Overview

How do you turn a much-loved local farm shop into a place customers can book, browse and buy from anywhere?

Ashvale Farm Shop had no website. Bookings for afternoon tea and seasonal experiences ran through the phone and social DMs, and Christmas hampers were word-of-mouth only. The team needed a single digital home that could carry the brand, take payments, and grow with their calendar of events.

The build had to feel as warm and considered as the shop itself — while quietly handling availability, capacity limits, gift cards and a busy seasonal trading window without adding hours of admin.

The Challenge

No existing website or digital presence
Bookings handled manually by phone and DMs
Seasonal product range with tight launch windows
Non-technical team — needs to be easy to manage

My Role

Brand-led visual design
Custom Shopify theme build
Booking & experience integration
Client training and launch support

Deliverables

Shopify storefront
Afternoon tea & experience bookings
Seasonal & Christmas product range
Gift cards and hampers

The Process

From Farm Gate
to Storefront

Scroll to explore

Discovery

Spent time understanding how the shop actually runs day-to-day — how bookings come in, when seasonal demand spikes, what the team wanted customers to feel before they ever walked through the door.

Strategy

Picked Shopify as the foundation: it gives a non-technical team a calm admin, and handles payments, gift cards and seasonal collections without bolt-ons. Mapped out which experiences and products would sit on the site at launch versus rolled in later.

Design

A warm, editorial visual language — generous typography, plenty of breathing room, and photography of the shop and the food doing most of the talking. The booking flow was designed to feel like picking a date for tea, not filling in a form.

Development

Custom Shopify theme with experience products configured for date and capacity, a seasonal collection structure that swaps in for Christmas without rebuilding pages, and gift cards / hampers as standalone products with their own merchandising.

Launch

Soft-launched ahead of the next afternoon tea sitting so the team could test the booking flow live before promoting widely. Hands-on training so the team can manage products, dates and content themselves.

Step 1 / 5

The Solution

Built to
Welcome.

A storefront that feels like the shop itself — warm, simple, and easy to come back to. Bookings, seasonal products and Christmas trading all running from one calm Shopify admin.

ashvalefarmshop.co.uk

Bookable
Experiences

Afternoon tea and seasonal experiences sold like products — with dates, sittings and capacity managed from the Shopify admin. No more juggling phone calls and a paper diary.

Seasonal
Storefront

A merchandising system designed around the calendar — Christmas hampers, Mother's Day, Easter — collections swap in cleanly without rebuilding pages or losing SEO.

Easy to
Run

Built around the people who'd be using it daily. Adding a new product, opening dates for a sitting, or refreshing the homepage are all small jobs the team can do without picking up the phone.

Reflections

What I
Learned.

First-website projects sit somewhere between brand and operations. These are the things I'd carry into the next one.

Bookings are products

Treating an afternoon tea sitting as a Shopify product — with date, capacity and variants — is far simpler than reaching for a dedicated booking app, and gives the team one place to manage everything they sell.

Design for the calendar

For a seasonal business, the homepage is never finished. Building a structure that's happy to swap from "summer experiences" to "Christmas hampers" without a redesign mattered more than any single page.

Train the team, then trust them

The site lives or dies on whether the people running the shop can keep it fresh. Spending time on training and writing short, practical how-tos paid back faster than any extra feature would have.

How do you turn a much-loved local farm shop into a place customers can book, browse and buy from anywhere?

From Farm Gateto Storefront

Built toWelcome.

BookableExperiences

SeasonalStorefront