Banyan Botanicals Website

Banyan Botanicals
Albuquerque, NM & Ashland, OR

Involvement

Creative Direction/Photography/Front-end Development/Design

Credits

  • Devang Shah, Operations
  • Shilpam Shah, Developer
  • Scott Friend, Developer
  • Steven Lyons, Creative Director, Developer, Photography
Banyan needed an online brand refresh while replacing aging architecture

Their primary sales channel was outgrowing its aging platform, needing a new responsive layout and UX to better reflect their maturing brand. Using a combined platform of Magento and ExpressionEngine to deliver an extensive ecommerce and educational site, we’ve been able to deliver a solid foundation for their future.

Bringing the brand to life

Working with an incredibly small team and an extensive amount of content, the layout design needed to be easy to implement and mostly templated. I wanted to focus the designs on a simplified color palette, our growing library of lifestyle and product photography, and plenty of whitespace for clean, readable content. Using a modular design system, I was able to keep the number of core templates low, yet still have a high level of customization within each section and page. It also better reflected the overall aesthetic of the brand I’d been building.

These roots run deep

Regardless of a visitor’s familiarity with Ayurveda, it is still a subject of extreme depth. To help guide visitors, we needed to build clear funnels to the shopping channel(Ayurvedic Products), the education channel(Ayurvedic practice), and the discovery channel(Your Ayurvedic Journey). Each template had to serve its content, but naturally guide users through those funnels from discovery, education, to product, and back again. The modular design system gives us the flexibility to adapt messages and content within each funnel to shorten development time and maintain consistency. With so many varied entry points to the site, message, module, and layout consistency was key.

The primary shopping funnel, starting with home and product details. Clean, with a clear content heirarchy, was the priority in these templates. Although products and product marketing are the focus, multiple placements on either template can be used for educational content. Glossary terms, product-related education, and related lifestyle content modules brought broader content to product details templates.

Evergreen educational content handled much of the incoming traffic and needed a compelling layout for content to draw users further into the funnels. These templates were more customizable to allow for editorial design geared for a better reading experience on long-form content while still allowing for module placements.

Insight blog home and story templates used the same grid and modules as the evergreen templates, but use a more basic layout for short-form posts. The story template allowed for multiple aspect-ratio lead-in images depending on the type of content being presented.

The core of the Banyan experience was through the discovery channel where users could take the dosha quiz, ending with content and products tailored to their specific health journey. This new version of the Ayurvedic Profile focused on guiding the user through the quiz, then delivering clear next steps of what should be done following absorbing the results.