"Having worked with Business Think on a previous funded digital marketing project, we liked Elliot’s no nonsense and straight to the point attitude, he’s great at taking something that seems complicated and making it really very black and white!

As a design company, we can be a ‘difficult’ client with every point size and line width considered, however, during the migration of our old website to the Shopify platform, Elliot took this in good spirit and with patience and helped to deliver a site that we are truly proud of, and that we are complimented on regularly. We would recommend Elliot as a friendly, motivated, supportive and amusing person to work with, with passion for the subject and a desire to stay up to date with the latest updates across digital marketing.

The new Shopify site has helped deliver a huge increase in traffic and in sales, according to Shopify site traffic is in the top 2% of stores that launched the same week as ours."

Faye Clifton at Green&Blue

Our work with Green&Blue

I first met the Green&Blue team after a referral from a business support agency. It was clear from the outset that this was a business who believed strongly in improving the environment and making a positive impact on wildlife. The Green&Blue vision is that every new house built needs to provide a home for wildlife as well as for us. That belief is at the heart of everything they do.

The owners Kate and Gavin also had a successful background in design and the visual quality of their existing websites was of the highest standard. The project goal was to exceed that design standard and create an e-commerce solution that would increase both Google ranking and sales.

The business was already successfully selling online. As a result, those initial meetings with Kate and Faye, their sales and marketing manager, focused on understanding the added value that Shopify could deliver over WordPress. The comparative simplicity and usability of the Shopify dashboard was the key difference. Going forward everything could be edited and managed independently of a designer, enabling the Green&Blue team to rapidly implement promotions and campaigns, to be more responsive to customers and have more control over their marketing.

From my perspective, those early discussions also explored exactly how the high design expectations could be translated into the Shopify platform. It was clear that custom coding would be needed to deliver the solution. In addition, Green&Blue technically had two existing websites, one a successful blog. The scale of data and SEO set-up to be converted and migrated was significant.

The team care so passionately about why they are in business and have been independently certified as a B Corporation, one of a growing group of companies who are reinventing business, by pursuing purpose as well as profit. That passion provides a clear direction and the team know exactly what they need to achieve to realise their vision. Meeting that level of expectation online is not always straightforward due to the technical limits of online platforms. That was the part that I enjoyed most on this project, having to innovate to create precisely what the business had visualised, with no room for compromise on my part. That meant learning a few new skills and stepping out of my comfort zone.

The outcome was a successful WordPress to Shopify migration, a new visual design, an improvement in Google ranking and an online business that can be managed independently by the team. Being a small part of their vision to make a positive impact on wildlife was a personal bonus.

Thank you Green&Blue for asking Business Think to complete this project.