Just Coffee

The need

In a globalized world, where tough competition and extractive practices tend to put pressure on the communities and environments of developing countries, there are businesses dedicated to putting the fair into the concept of fair trade. Just Coffee, founded in 2001, is one of these: a worker-owned cooperative in Madison, Wisconsin dedicated to “…a model of commerce based on transparency, respect for labor and environmental sustainability, where the proceeds of production are distributed as equitably as possible along the supply chain.”

The Just Coffee team reached out to CoLab after deciding they really needed a “face lift for our cumbersome and clunky site.” A painful part of their existing online store was maintaining two sites, one in WordPress and another in Shopify, which not only added complexity and lack of congruence in style, it also offered a substandard user experience for their customers. 

One of the features Just Coffee wanted to revamp was their Coffee Tracker, a database that allows the customer to trace every bag of roasted coffee back to the grower who produced the beans.

Simply by entering a code found on a label on each bag of coffee, customers can discover the beans’ country of origin, roast type, date of roasting, the international green coffee lot number, and most importantly for consumer trust, the price-per-pound paid to the grower cooperative and a link to the contract under which the green coffee was purchased.

This feature of the site was key to Just Coffee, because of its power to connect consumers and growers across distances and give meaning to the fair trade concept. It needed to be easy for both consumers and Just Coffee workers to use.

The discovery collaboration

A key part of this project was working with Ren LaDassor, the graphics lead at Just Coffee, who had an overall brand vision and a robust collection of design collateral that was integral to the spirit of Just Coffee. Ren had created a unique name and bag design for each combination of roast, blend and origin of the coffee beans, which artfully matched the flavor notes to the artwork.

“Ralph [Ralph Cutler, CoLab’s co-founder and design lead] was incredibly helpful in setting up different layouts to explore, both in terms of user experience and how they made us feel,” said Ren. “He also worked our design collateral into the layouts, to make it look and feel like ‘us’.” 

During the discovery process and visual theme selection, one key driver was showcasing the coffee bag designs in the site. To tackle this, the selected theme had to have a product grid with large images, to allow users to identify themselves with the art and explore the coffee types. 

“We were given the opportunity to explore options on a vision board, and see all the parts put together to make something we felt was Just Coffee,” said Ren.

What we built

The discovery process led to the decision to move all content from the existing WordPress site to Shopify, in a way that reflected the brand and balanced the company’s goals.

The old site had generated good organic traffic, so it was important to migrate and manage the existing blog and news posts to leverage that, without compromising the purchasing process.

“The migration of the data was pretty seamless,” said Alex Cummings, sales rep at Just Coffee. “It felt to me like we were in good hands all the time, and we weren’t ever at risk of losing anything. It felt natural and easy.” 

For the coffee tracker, Colab replaced an error-prone embedded Excel spreadsheet with a robust database that makes it easy for Just Coffee workers to upload new coffee batches, codes and support documents. The experience for cust omers is also swift: they plug in their code and instantly see the coffee’s origin and even a link to the certificate, contract and bill of shipment for the batch. Just commerce thrives on transparency.

Accessibility for people with disabilities was also an important part of the project. First, because it’s the right thing to do, and second, because online retailers are by far the most likely businesses to be sued for non-compliance with the Americans with Disability Act. 

To ensure usability by customers with disabilities beyond just legal compliance, and to avoid costly remediations, CoLab made accessibility part of the design process – as we do with all site redesigns or new designs.

The result

Capturing Just Coffee’s identity was the primary goal of this project, in addition to the practical benefits of migrating and consolidating the information in one platform.

As Ren put it, “CoLab gave us a space to identify who we were going to be in this new website. When reviewing the blog, we asked ourselves ‘Is this who we are, who we want to be?’ CoLab waited patiently during this process while we decided who we were and how it was reflected in the website.”