The Flying Squirrel had built a beautiful single-estate coffee brand and a loyal in-store following, but the online store wasn't converting. As lead designer and founder of my own practice, I ran a research-led redesign of the storefront that taught visitors how to choose, customize, and trust a bag of specialty coffee. Online sales grew 80% in under six months.
The Flying Squirrel was a single-estate specialty coffee brand with real depth — grown, roasted, and known among people who already loved good coffee. In person, the product sold itself. Online, it didn't. The storefront looked nice but left first-time visitors unsure what to buy, how it was different, or why it was worth the price.
I led a research-led redesign of the e-commerce experience end to end — heuristic evaluation, user research, information architecture, interaction design, and prototyping. The goal wasn't a prettier site; it was a storefront that could do what a knowledgeable shop assistant does: educate, differentiate, and build enough confidence to convert.
In a café or a store, choosing coffee is sensory and guided — you read the shelf, you smell the beans, someone walks you through roast levels and brew methods. The original website flattened all of that into a generic product grid. Visitors landed, didn't understand the range, and left.
Rather than restyle pages, I framed the work around the journey a coffee buyer actually moves through — from curiosity to a confident purchase. Every design decision had to move someone one step further down this funnel.
Figures from the 2016 research round (15 interviews · 31 survey responses · in-store observation).
I focused the design effort on the three screens that carried the journey: the homepage (set the story), the coffees listing (make the range navigable), and the product details page (educate and convert).
The product card did a lot of work, so it earned its own iteration loop — from a rough Sketch block to a final card that balanced imagery, name, character, and a clear path to add to cart.
The redesigned, fully responsive store does three jobs the old one couldn't: it structures the catalog the way people shop, it lets buyers reorder fast, and it gives every coffee a rich, educational details page.
The research-led redesign turned a good-looking-but-quiet store into one that taught people why the coffee was worth buying — and made buying it easy. The biggest lift came from pairing education (details pages, brewing guidance) with a fast path for the people who already knew what they wanted.
Collaborate with engineering early. Designing with a clear view of what was buildable — and bringing developers in before final UI — kept the redesign realistic and shippable on a small-business timeline.
Design for the code's capability. Constraints weren't a compromise; they sharpened the work. Knowing the platform's limits up front meant every screen I designed could actually ship.
Cross-functional teamwork wins. Owning research, IA, design, and prototyping while staying close to the founder and developers is what let one designer move a business metric this far, this fast.
The online store was a genuine success. Since then, the business has realigned around on-the-ground experiences — and the brand has evolved into a specialty coffee venture focused on coffee shops across India. The depth of thinking from this era now lives in those physical spaces rather than the original storefront.
