The London Honey Company logo and website

Spreading the London Honey buzz through a new e-commerce website

14 Aug 2017

2 min read

When urban beekeeper, Steve Benbow, first installed a beehive on a London roof in 1999, he unwittingly tapped into an appetite for delicious gourmet honey of provenance. The London Honey Company was born, but soon evolved beyond urban honey to produce and source single origin honeys from across the UK and beyond, as well as developing honey ranges for top clients such as Fortnum & Mason and Daylesford.

Having expanded from their urban roots, The London Honey Company felt they needed an online space to better reflect their story and ramp up their ecommerce and online marketing efforts to reach a wider market outside London.

While they had an established website with respectable Google rankings for some key search terms, their existing site was dated and not very user friendly. That’s why London Honey approached us to create an ecommerce website that would tell the story of the brand, deliver an engaging shopping experience and help drive sales.

We wanted to make sure the new site would be as easy as possible to administrate, so we chose one of our preferred ecommerce platforms, Shopify, to support London Honey’s needs. Taking advantage of the endless design possibilities of the platform's flexible theme architecture, we developed a bespoke ecommerce site to bring their refreshed brand identity to life across the site.

We also commissioned photographer Tif Hunter to give a polished and professional consistency to the overall look and feel of their online product range. High quality imagery throughout the site helped create a customised solution that reflected the individuality of the new brand. By incorporating images of the hives and beekeepers in situ we ensured that the brand heritage and Steve’s unique story took centre stage. A contact form, newsletter sign up and blog were included to allow the marketing manager to place regular new content onto the site and build a database of loyal customers.

London Honey's Business Development Manager, Emily Reed said:

"The 999 team really listened to what we needed from our new website, but also had great suggestions for elements we hadn’t considered. We love the look and feel of the site and it's really easy to manage online orders as well as keep the content up to date. The site is better integrated than it’s ever been with our social media, mailing list software, accounting package and Google analytics, supporting us to grow our community and sales.

Since launch, we've seen some very positive results across our digital channels and from January to July our online sales are up by 69% on last year."

#ecommerce #photography #userexperience #webdesign

Written by

Catherine Watson, Digital Marketer at 999 Design

Catherine Watson

Digital Marketer