Lead designer on the Nordic garden group's first direct-to-consumer store — Kekkilä in Finland, Hasselfors Garden in Sweden. Brief to live in two and a half months.
Kekkilä Group had spent decades selling soil, fertiliser and garden goods through retailers. They had never once sold to a customer themselves.
Going direct meant more than a store. It meant learning the whole chain end to end — order, payment, shipping, logistics, delivery, feedback — inside a business with no existing digital commerce muscle, and no budget for a flagship build.
It also meant two brands and two countries at once: Kekkilä in Finland, Hasselfors Garden in Sweden. Same group, different languages, different product ranges, and reseller relationships that couldn't be undercut. And a hard deadline — live before the summer growing season, or wait a year.
We shipped a real store with a handful of products rather than a half-finished store with all of them — and built it on the systems they already had.
WooCommerce on top of the existing WordPress estate, so nothing had to be replatformed. As lead designer I owned creative direction and UX across every customer-facing surface, designing the product and category architecture so it worked in two languages and two markets without becoming two separate stores.
Design also had to reach past the interface. I worked on scoping the backend flow and how it met their existing systems, and on choosing logistics and payment partners that fit the business now and later. Twelve people across the agency, the client and partner vendors, in one project room, shipping in parallel work streams every week.
Creative direction and UX across every customer-facing surface, in two languages and two markets.
Structured the catalog so it worked as one store, not two.
Mapped how the new store would meet their existing WordPress systems.
Chose logistics and payment partners built for the business now and later.
Launched on schedule, ahead of the growing season.
The MVP did what an MVP is supposed to do and rarely does — it proved the business case fast enough to justify the next investment, and taught the organisation how digital commerce actually runs before they'd bet anything large on it.
