Shepherd's Landscape Supply is a local plant nursery that specializes in both wholesale and retail sales, providing high quality plants and landscape material to homeowners and professional landscapers. This project started with the vision to bring their inventory online to create an e-commerce website that would also help automate and funnel new customers into their business.
Click here to view Shepherd's live website.
Logo + Brand Design
Shepherd's already had an established logo and brand, but it was slightly on the dated side. We refreshed the look while protecting the integrity and long-standing identity of the brand. Additionally, we established a new online color palette to be used to highlight their business.
The new logo utilized a cleaner, san-serif font along with some subtle layering to tie in the tree elements. Additionally, the colors were updated to fully match the new color palette.
Desktop + Mobile Web Design
Shepherd's is not your average 'small' business–with thousands of plants stocked at any given time, we really wanted to be able to showcase most of the plants without overwhelming their audience.
Additionally, their market is distinctly split with two entirely different audiences. There are homeowners/retail sales–that are looking to purchase a handful of plants at a time–and then there are the professional landscapers who focus on speed and high quantity. With two vastly different audiences, we decided to tackle them separately by creating pages on the site specifically for each group.
The homeowners page highlights blogs teaching basic planting principals and also showcases beginner friendly plants. The phrasing is more entry level and inviting for any level of DIY-er, encouraging them to come check out the nursery grounds and reach out with any questions.
On the flip side, we have a landscaper's hub specifically built for the pros–here they can quickly access wholesale availability (password protected on a separate page) as well as read industry specific blogs about local and national pests and new landscaping tactics and processes. Product offerings focus on language familiar to a landscaper (such as screening plants, ground cover, etc) to help them quickly find what they need.
The mobile website was a main focal point of the site considering how we wanted landscapers to be able to access and use the site from remote jobs and projects.
We optimized the shopping experience to be as simple as possible, whether on a cell phone or on a desktop. Several collections were used to create pockets of plants (such as trees vs. shrubs vs. perennials, etc) to assist viewers in easily finding what they're looking for. Search bars have been strategically scattered throughout the site to enable shoppers to find an exact match.
Additionally, each shopper can create a personalized account that saves their favorite items, remembers their carts, and shows all their past purchases with Shepherds, being particularly helpful to landscapers who often have repeat or similar bulk purchases.
A large portion of this project had been taking photos of all their plant offerings and uploading them to the website as inventory. We've decided to photograph each plant during each season to better showcase the life cycle and range of each plant. Custom branded tag graphics were created to quickly identify the season in the picture. That said, several processes have been established to streamline these uploads without disrupting their day to day business.
Ongoing Marketing Efforts
This project is still in the works and we have some big plans for social media, email marketing and so much more!
Stay tuned for updates at this project progresses!
