The Brief
Audrey Coffee is an eastern-shore Hobart café — two stores, plus the kind of loyal, rusted-on local following that takes years to build. The website they came to me with had been built themselves on Square. Perfectly functional, did its job day-to-day, but the brand had moved on faster than the site had. What worked as a placeholder a couple of years ago wasn’t doing the business justice anymore.
The job was to build a proper home online — and figure out the brand direction along the way.
Our Approach
A few early conversations were less about web mechanics and more about brand. It became clear pretty quickly that Audrey wanted to lean hard into retro, grainy imagery — film-stock textures, slightly off-kilter photography, more indie-record-sleeve than corporate café. The site needed to commit to that direction confidently, not treat it as a decorative layer on top of a generic e-commerce template.
Square had been fine for taking orders but it was never going to tell the story. I rebuilt the site as a custom Shopify storefront — proper product management, scalable e-commerce, and the design control Square’s templates couldn’t match. The retro grain threads through every product photo, hero image and section break, so the visual identity holds whether someone’s browsing beans, merch or consumables.
Beans, merch and consumables each got their own clear pathway through the catalogue, so wholesale customers, gift-buyers and regulars could find what they were looking for without wading through everything else. Product photography got room to breathe — full-bleed images, generous whitespace, no apologies.
The Outcome
Audrey now has a storefront online that looks like Audrey. The retro grain isn’t a gimmick — it’s a visible commitment to the kind of café they actually run, and it gives customers something specific to remember the brand by. The Shopify foundation means they can scale the catalogue, add wholesale features, or run promotions without bumping into the platform ceiling they hit on Square.
Most importantly: when someone lands on the site for the first time, it sets the tone for the in-store experience rather than undercutting it.