The Covid-19 pandemic affected many businesses in the UK and forced them to pivot or fail. The restaurant chain, The Real Greek, was one of many restaurant businesses in the UK to begin selling their food online while restaurants remained closed. I was the creative resource for the new The Real Greek Marketplace.
The brief was to create an online shop quickly and within a small budget. The dev team chose the Woocommerce solution and the design team chose to build the frontend with a pre-purchased Woocommerce theme. I began by working up some homepage design options for desktop and mobile, to establish a look and feel for the new arm of the business. The client wanted it to look very Greek and in line with their restaurant branding, but to also have a market feel. The Real Greek are known for their bright, bold blue so I used this but paired it with a sand colour to give a rustic edge to the colour palette. I created a tile pattern of abstract olives to give the design a sense of an age-old agora in Greece.
After the shop look and feel was finalised, and using a combination of the theme's page builder and my own HTML, I created the static page templates and then coded my own CSS for all of the styles within a child theme. Due to budget limitations, I was unable to create any of the other page designs in design software first, so I had the challenge of designing everything as I went, using and expanding upon the style already established in the homepage design. This included styling every element across the checkout process and every HTML email template in the Woocommerce eCRM process. The biggest challenge was to test and retest every conceivable scenario to ensure I had re-styled all of the default styles.
In addition to the shop's design and frontend, I photographed all of the products and some of the lifestyle imagery too.
Due to the pandemic, I had to shoot the products at home with a portable studio set-up in my kitchen. Thanks to my earlier career as a photograper, I had all of the knowledge and experience with shooting tricky subjects like glass bottles and highly reflective packaging. Check out the shop for a closer look at the project.