Sea Chi

Sanandra, owner of Sea Chi, needed a completely redesigned and rebuilt ecommerce website. Sea Chi’s old website had served them for many years, but it was difficult for Sanandra to update or make changes to, and its text and visuals didn’t showcase the unique qualities of Sea Chi’s skin and hair care products.

We worked with Sanandra to learn more about her customers, products and business goals to discover what her needs were for the new website as well as defining what we wanted to highlight with the redesign. We wanted to convey the unique ingredients, and the made-with-love quality that makes Sea Chi so special.

This included a complete redesign of the look and feel of the website, co-ordinated with her current graphic designer, Stephen Brogdon of Brogdon Designs. We wanted the site to be updated and modern, but also familiar and easy to use for Sea Chi’s loyal customers.

We kept the structure of the new site similar to the old site to ensure a smooth transition for her customers, but redesigned each page and created all new written and photographic content.

We decided to use Shopify, as it is a robust platform and one of Sanandra’s issues with her old site was that the technology was aging and often failing. Shopify is probably the largest eCommerce platform available and is kept up-to-date and constantly improved upon. It is also a hosted platform, so none of the responsibility for updates or security falls on the store owner—Shopify’s team take care of all of it—leaving Sanandra with a sense of assurance that her new site can be relied upon.

We had a very specific vision for the new Sea Chi website, so instead of using an existing Shopify theme, we built our own from the ground up for a perfectly tailored solution. We also integrated some existing third-party Shopify apps for Sanandra, such as a shipping app and Quickbooks integration. We also wrote our own app which integrates with the Shopify Product Reviews app to send emails to customers 10 days after an order is fulfilled asking them to review each of the products they purchased.

• Built on the Shopify eCommerce platform
• Custom photography
• Copywriting
• Mailchimp integration for sending announcements to Sea Chi’s email lists
• Third-party app integration
• Custom app development

One of our goals was to create a strong visual presence and brand identity for Sea Chi through new photography for the site.

For the home page, we conceived and shot two photos to convey the essence of Sea Chi, to quickly and effectively communicate the brand's values. For each of the product categories, we created an art-directed banner showcasing some of the products in that category, along with herbal ingredients and other elements to express the spirit of the products. These also double as navigation on the home page so customers can quickly find the products they are looking for.

At the start of the project, we brainstormed a set of keywords that captured the spirit of Sea Chi, and used these keywords throughout—from planning the concepts and sketching out ideas to gathering props and ingredients for each image, right through to post-processing.

Each image tells the story of the Sea Chi products in the category it was created for, using flowers, crystals, herbal infusions, fabrics and more. While each photo conveys a different aspect of Sea Chi, using the keywords we came up with at the start of the process gives the photos a cohesive style.

We also photographed all of the Sea Chi products individually on seamless for the product pages and shot portraits of Sanandra and her staff.