Heavenly Tea Leaves
A Fresh Brew for a Family-Owned Tea Brand
Family-owned since 2006, Heavenly Tea Leaves has built its reputation sourcing some of the freshest loose-leaf teas and botanicals, creating moments of connection and comfort for tea lovers everywhere. With a refreshed packaging identity in hand, they needed a digital experience that reflected the same care and quality as their teas. I redesigned and developed their Shopify platform from the ground up.
Aligning the Digital Identity
Heavenly Tea Leaves already had strong brand bones: the hand-lettered script, the earthy greens, the warmth. It didn't need replacing, it needed refining. I refreshed the color palette for digital, expanding it with web-specific tints and grays that gave the design system room to breathe across backgrounds, cards, and UI elements. The goal was a digital presence that felt like a natural extension of the packaging, not a departure from it.
Rethinking the Storefront
I reimagined the site's architecture and navigation, streamlining the entire journey from homepage to checkout. The old layout buried their best products behind generic sorting and a one-size-fits-all page structure. I restructured everything around tea types (herbal, green, matcha, chai) so people could browse the way they actually think about tea. Each category got its own PDP template: matcha pages led with preparation and sourcing, herbal blends led with benefits and ingredients. Collection pages got smarter filtering so customers could shop by what they care about, not just alphabetical order.
Making the Catalog Discoverable
The original site had over 200 SKUs but no clear way to explore them. New visitors had to know what they wanted before they arrived, which meant most of the catalog went undiscovered. I designed a discovery layer that surfaced products through multiple entry points: by type, by benefit, by occasion. A "new to tea" flow gave first-time buyers confidence, while returning customers could get to their favorites in two clicks. The trust section (premium quality, 100% organic, eco-friendly, clean ingredients) wasn't decorative. Each claim linked to real sourcing practices, giving hesitant buyers the reassurance they needed to convert.
Tea Club as a Retention Engine
Tea drinkers are creatures of habit. They reorder the same blends on roughly the same schedule. That behavior was an opportunity. I designed and built Tea Club, a monthly subscription box that rotates with the seasons. Spring brings floral oolongs and jasmine greens, winter leans into spiced chais and warming herbals. The strategic intent was threefold: predictable recurring revenue for the brand, higher lifetime value per customer, and a reason to keep coming back that felt like a gift, not an obligation. I designed the sign-up, management, and gifting flows to feel native to the brand. Joining Tea Club felt like becoming part of something, not just checking a subscription box.
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