The Challenge:

After striking out twice, we needed find a platform for our website that we could trust.

Before Stage Design Group, there was Hemetic. Our initial effort to gain footing as young self employed entrepreneurs, Hemetic was a Made in USA carry good and lifestyle brand aimed at selling high quality, fashionable, and conscientious products to the millennial market. While we learned many lessons from this endeavor, the most relevant to where we find ourselves today is the value of a great backend for websites. Initially built on Squarespace, and then on Wordpress, Hemetic websites were difficult to update and maintain for years. They worked, but we found ourselves spending so much time building, updating, and maintaining a website that offered an average user experience for our customers that eventually we knew we had to make a change.

OUr Solution:

Having recently discover Webflow, we decided to relocate and rebuild our website.

As luck would have it, Jake had just begun working on the Foam Brewers website at about the time that we were just about out of patience with our Wordpress website. In exploring options for that project, Jake came across Webflow. In the midst of a positive experience with building the Foam website, we decided to reloacte and build a brand new site for Hemetic on the platform.

Recreating and improving our direct to consumer storefront

For our direct to consumer brand, Webflow had solutions for all of our needs. First and foremost, one of our primary concerns was making sure that Webflow could handle our E-commerce needs, including clear product presentation, an easy to use check out process, and transactional Emails. As it turned out, Webflow checked all of these boxes and more. Compared to Wordpress, not only did Webflow offer all of these features, but most significantly, building out unique and interesting product pages with dynamic content was an absolute breeze compared to Wordpress’s code-heavy, convoluted file structure.

Content Marketing is Everything, so we built a blog

After getting our shop setup, our next step was to dial in a blog, a key element to our content marketing strategy. Noting how difficult it was to update our blog consistently in Wordpress, we strategically utilized Webflow’s CMS to create a structure for blog posts that would allow a general template based approach to creating posts, that also left room for customization based on the contents of each story.

sharing our story

Finally, with our shop setup, blog posts transferred, and a strong foundation in place to enable easy updating, we rounded the site out with supporting pages. In this line of work, having great products is only half the battle. The other half is in telling your brand story and ensuring clear lines of communication with customers. As such, we created a strong About page, as well as a contact form for our consumer customers and a specialized inquiry form for corporate customers who might be interested in large orders of customizes products.

THE RESULTS:

Webflow improved our website immeasurably. Now, we feel obligated to tell everyone.

Upon launching the new website, we’d managed to solve every problem we were facing with our previous Wordpress site. Page speeds went up. Shop navigation was simpler. Mobile versions of the website not only worked, but functioned like they were actually designed for mobile. Updating and editing the website was immeasurably faster. Sales increased. All told, it was ultimately the transfer of the Hemetic website from Wordpress to Webflow that opened our eyes to the potential of this new platform and really encouraged us to begin pitching Webflow as a solution to clients. Knowing how much this switch helped our business, it became something of a moral obligation to encourage other businesses to improve their online ecosystem by making the same transition.