E-commerce web design for a Santa Barbara smokehouse that now takes retail and wholesale orders in one store

Cambridge House hand-cure their salmon, hang it by rope in brick kilns and smoke it over full logs of oak and apple wood, and high-end retailers across the US stock it. Buying it online felt nothing like that. The old website had served the smokehouse for years, but it was hard to manage, the checkout was clunky and the design didn't reflect the product. It also wasn't built for the way they now sold, to shoppers at home and to trade customers who wanted to order in bulk.

A storefront built on the brand they already had

The colours, typography and visual direction of Cambridge House's refreshed brand were already set, so we built a custom theme for the new store around them instead of reworking the look. In the Shopify website design, the product pages are there to make buying easy. Search helps customers find the right variety, the add-to-cart flow is simple, and automatic emails bring back shoppers who leave something in their basket.

Wholesale ordering in the same store

We built wholesale ordering into the same store as retail, something many food and drink brands need once they sell to the trade as well as the public. Food service and retail partners now place bulk orders online instead of going back and forth by email and phone, and the team manages both kinds of order in one place. Smoked salmon is perishable, so every order ships on rates set by delivery zone and within set delivery windows.

Every account and order carried across

Returning customers shouldn't have to start again because the shop has changed, so we moved everything across from the old site, including the product catalogue, customer accounts and thousands of past orders. Customers kept their accounts and order history through the move.

Cambridge House now sells to shoppers and trade customers through one store that does justice to the craft behind their salmon. The team has run it themselves from day one, which leaves them free to smoke salmon the way it has been done for generations.

Moving to a new platform doesn't have to mean starting over, because customer accounts and order history can come with you. If you sell to trade customers as well as the public, taking both kinds of order in one store saves a lot of back-and-forth by email and phone. A custom design lets a specialist food brand look as good online as its product does, without losing anything the store needs to do.

Read more about our web design service, or see more web design case studies and other food and drink projects.