Bluebells Cakery is a boutique bakery in Auckland, and one of the city's most loved. Cakes are hand-decorated and baked fresh in-store, for weddings, birthdays and occasions people can't afford to get wrong. Their following is local, loyal and vocal. Most of that reputation was built at the counter, in person, by word of mouth.
Bluebells wanted an online experience that matched the reputation of the product. Not a theme refresh. A site that could sell a hand-decorated cake to someone who had never set foot in the store, and give them enough confidence to spend accordingly. Commercially, that meant more orders completed online, and fewer customers leaving because a question went unanswered.
A celebration cake is a difficult thing to sell online. The purchase is high-consideration and locked to a date, the product is customisable, and the vocabulary is trade shorthand – a first-time customer buying a "naked cake" has no idea what they're buying.
A large share of traffic also skipped the homepage and landed straight on category pages, so the journey we wanted people to take wasn't the what most of them took. Every unanswered question about lead time, delivery or pickup was a reason to leave.
We treated the site as three separate jobs rather than one redesign. New visitors needed to believe the price was justified before they browsed. Category visitors needed to browse without being overwhelmed, because most of them arrived there first. Product pages needed to remove every remaining reason to hesitate.
The order matters: imagery and proof earn the click, clarity earns the order. So we prioritised the information that reduces uncertainty – lead times, delivery, pickup, customisation – over anything purely decorative, and wrote for someone who has never bought a decorated cake before.
Creative & UX/UI redesigned the site on Shopify, homepage to checkout. On the homepage we led with hero imagery that shows the craft close up, restructured navigation into clear product categories, and built the brand's proof into the page: customer reviews, the Instagram feed, customer photos, and the reasons the price is what it is – hand-decorated, baked fresh in-store.
A Fan Favourites section gives first-time buyers somewhere to start. Category pages got a shorter, plainer filter set, cross-sell modules, promotional tiles placed inside the grid, and short descriptions with tooltips that translate the jargon.
Product pages moved delivery, lead times and pickup details above the fold, with reviews and packaging imagery alongside. We also recommended dynamic product imagery that updates as a customer changes flavour or option, so the cake on screen is the cake they are buying.
