St. Ewe Free Range Eggs
A digital brand platform for growth
Website design
Website replatform
St. Ewe Free Range Eggs is a proud, family business - not owned by a corporation like their competitors - despite listing nationwide in most major supermarkets. Their growth has been rapid yet they’ve never lost sight of their founding values based on nothing but the highest quality eggs. Their family values extend throughout their team (who regularly lunch at the long kitchen table in their purpose-built headquarters in Cornwall) to their relationships with farmers who are visited personally by either the CEO or MD.
However, as a key touchpoint for the brand, their website wasn’t delivering this foundational narrative of family values and highest quality produce. Furthermore, it was restricting the marketing and sales teams’ ability to tell the evolving brand story consistently and in a compelling way.
Our challenge?
Produce a new website design that conveys the brand’s character and product quality, supported by a content management system that is intuitive to use and flexible so that the marketing team can better tell the brand story and be proud to promote it as a go-to for marketing and sales activity.
Building a partnership
Our first job was to immerse ourselves in the brand and the business, which was a hugely fulfilling experience, as the culture of the company meant that we were welcomed with open arms by everyone. We were taken through the journey of a St. Ewe egg and the challenges that keep the marketing & sales teams up at night, helping us find the right direction for the design and the technical solution that would help them overcome their challenges.
Our mission
It was clear that our mission was to develop a brand-led digital platform for St. Ewe that enabled them to build equity in their brand through a more immersive digital experience, and better equip the sales & marketing teams to continue their upward growth trajectory.
A collaborative design
The brand toolkit was evolving and the in-house design team had been refreshing their packaging designs, whilst the marketing team began working with Jennifer Armitage to produce illustrations that captured the essence of St. Ewe. Our design for the website was inspired by these elements to ensure brand continuity across the customer experience.
Enhancing the brand’s visual identity for digital
The brand’s visual identity hadn’t really been exercised in digital until we brought our fresh, brand-led perspective to the table. The use of colour and typography was a particular focus during our design exploration, quickly landing on a use of the palette and new typography that was warmly received by the client as it resolved a wider challenge they’d not yet solved.
Welcome to St. Ewe
St. Ewe Free Range Eggs is now a household name, but few know that St. Ewe is the name of the place and the home of the brand in Cornwall. The marketing team placed particular importance on welcoming website users to St. Ewe to help them make the connection between the eggs, the church and the name, so we explored the challenge of making this an integral part of the overall user experience.
The header section on the homepage that greets users is constructed of a series of images which ‘stack’ behind each other and an animation gives the effect of the hills rolling as you scroll down the page. This is all managed in the CMS, giving the client the freedom to switch out the assets seasonally.
“We couldn’t be happier with the website Gendall has created for us. They truly took the time to understand our business, values, and vision, and they’ve delivered a design that beautifully reflects the St. Ewe brand.
The website is not only visually appealing, but built with both our needs and our users’ needs at its heart. It’s intuitive, flexible, and ready to grow with us.
As a local company that shares our commitment to sustainability and transparent communication, Gendall were fantastic to work with from start to finish.”
- Nikki Owen, Head of PR & Communications
Brand & Hen personality
We quickly learned that the Hens - the centre of the St. Ewe-niverse - have various quirks and personalities, so the team wanted to have a bit of fun and try and get a little bit of their ‘naughtiness’ into the design. We incorporated interstitial asset placements into the build, meaning illustrations of the Hens in various stances can be added by the client ‘on top’ of pages to break up the content and inject a bit of that personality.
For the love of good food
Publishing a regular stream of eggciting stories and eggceptional recipes was a priority for the marketing team, as they have a growing library of blog posts and recipes.
These sections would need to be categorised so that visitors could narrow down the list according to their context and interest (by ‘topic’ for news or ‘mealtime’ for recipes, for example), and we needed to find a way of simplifying the fairly complex data structure for ingredients, method, number of feeds, time to make etc for the client to manage more quickly & easily on an ongoing basis.
Website engineering
Key Features
Responsive design across mobile, tablet and desktop devices
Content creation, editing, and publishing via Sanity CMS
Real-time content updates and versioning
Modular build for near infinite page layout combinations
SEO for improved search engine ranking
Integration with Google Analytics for tracking user behaviour & conversions
Sanity.io is a great system. A blank, unopinionated canvas to structure the backend of their website in a way that fits the business structure and makes for an intuitive editor experience for St Ewe’s marketing team.
With document referencing for recipes, careers, hotspots and other data, it allows an editor to write once and use that data on any page, retaining that all important single point of truth. This structuring and headless architecture means that this doesn’t just tie the data into steweeggs.com, the door is open for micro-sites, apps and IOT devices.
Flexible & Performant
Our headless solution combines the super-intuitive Sanity CMS and Gatsby frontend framework producing an easy-to-use CMS for quick content editing, and a frontend that loads quickly for users. Our modular approach to design is flexible and responsive, providing the client with the means to grow the site with near limitless combinations of page layouts and content, keeping it fresh, increasing shelf life and giving visitors variety.