Based in the Oxfordshire countryside, The Little Goat Soap Company is an artisan producer of Goat Milk Soaps, Lotions, Bath Soaks and Lip Balms. All their products are cruelty-free, environmentally friendly, and made from natural products such as Shea Butter, Coconut and Olive Oil and crucially Goats Milk, which is sourced from their own herd of goats!
The Little Goat Soap Company approached Bluesight to help with support on their eCommerce Website, Social Media Management and to help improve their SEO rankings to reduce their spend on Google Ads.
Upon looking at the site and running a few tests, Bluesight found that the site had some issues that meant it would be difficult to improve their current search ranking for certain key terms applicable to their product range. The website was also not aligned with the brand visually, and did not reflect the quality of the products they love to produce.
Both The Little Goat Soap Company and Bluesight decided that rather than trying to improve the current website, it would be better to start from the ground up with a brand new website that would allow a new visual identity to be implemented that resonates with their mostly 35-55 female audience. It would also reflect the artisan nature of the brand and be built with good practices that would aid the initial goal of increasing their SEO ranking.
Upon deciding that a new website was in need, we decided to build it on WordPress like the previous website had been, to ensure familiarity to those managing it. We put together a new sitemap that structured pages in a conventional hierarchy that would ensure that not only users could navigate the website easily, but also search engines such as Google and Bing.
Internally, a set of wireframes were produced for each of the seven templates that would be used within the website (Home, Core, Product Archive, Product Detail, Blog Archive, Blog Detail and Contact Page ). These wireframes were designed with ease of use to the end user in mind, creating clear paths to allow visitors to find the products they're after and navigate to a checkout funnel with ease. The 'Core' template uses a variety of blocks that can be added and arranged as needed to suit various layouts that allow the website editors to create a variety of pages as and when they are required.
Rather than rebranding everything for The Little Goat Soap Company, the most efficient thing to do was to base the design of the website on the existing packaging of their soap products, which have a rustic, farm house appearance. To do this, Spectral (a Google Font) was chosen for headings and closely resembles the serif font found on the existing packaging. Spectral is a great font for headings and larger text, but would be too complex for body text, hence we decided to pair it with Mulish (another Google Font). Mulish is a sans-serif font that is easily readable at smaller sizes, great for screen and print and has a variety of weights available.
For the main brand colour, we wanted to choose to use a neutral cream shade similar to Wimborne White by Farrow & Ball. The shade has a warmer tone and feels less sterile than pure white, while still having a predominantly light and fresh feel. Rather than using black to accent the Winborne White, we decided to add dark navy as an accent colour, allowing for plenty of contrast between the background and text to ensure all copy was easy to read, while giving the website an elegant and classic feel. As for the primary calls to action, we chose to complement the navy with an olive/fern green that stood out for use on buttons and important information such as promotional banners.
As previously stated the new website is built using WordPress as the CMS; and WooCommerce powering the e-commerce side of the operation. Both of these tools were chosen due to the client having previous experience with them and both being robust platforms with plenty of support and features to expand functionality.
A number of additional functionalities were added to WooCommerce such as the ability to offer subscription plans; setting up a variety of customer types for B2B customers; and integration with MailChimp and Facebook.
As The Little Goat Soap Company have been in business for 10+ years, they also had thousands of customer accounts that needed to be migrated from the old site to the new site, as well as all the historical orders so all customers would retain their prior account information. This also ensured that customers would not need to create new accounts, as well as pre-emptively avoiding any blockages for The Little Goat Soap Company.
Along with the development of the new website, The Little Goat Soap Company required social media management of their Instagram and Facebook accounts to reach new audiences and to spread the word about their various products. Each month, various posts are published covering a variety of topics, both informative and fun. These topics include education about the benefits of goat milk for the skin; highlighting the harsh substances that are used in mass-produced soaps; sharing fun facts about goats; and introducing followers to various members of the herd; all the while spreading the news of upcoming discounts and sales. Check out The Little Goat Soap Company's Instagram
Before we began working with The Little Goat Soap Company, all their products were simply photographed on a white background - perfect for product listings on the website, but lacking character and allure. As the new website was going to have more scope for imagery to be included and to make their social profiles more visually appealing, we decided to do a photoshoot. This included an on-site visit to where the soaps are made in order to capture the artisanal craft and soap creation process. The latter half of the day was spent photographing each product in studio to showcase the variety of soaps, lotions, bath soaks and lip balms on offer.
The result is a variety of outputs consisting of a beautiful new website that truly reflects The Little Goat Soap Company's brand and resonates with their target audience as well as being the perfect base to begin increasing their search engine rankings. Not only have the visuals been improved, it also receives top scores across various site performance tools. Along with the website, their Instagram and Facebook social media profiles have been aligned with the new-look website and show an increase in engagement. And to top it off, The Little Goat Soap Company have a library of images that can be used for a variety of uses going forward.
Make sure to check out The Little Goat Soap Company!
If you are looking for any of the services we have provided for The Little Goat Soap Company then please get in touch.
