Context

BevMo! was a 30 year old brand with a 20 year old e-comm site.

BevMo! has been around since 1994, and its digital presence... showed its age, with users unable to properly shop for their alcohol needs. With past experiments building previous brands like Ben & Jerry's under our belt, a group of designers, devs, and Shopify engineers came together to migrate and improve the entire BevMo! experience.

Key research insights

We listened to our most dedicated BevMo customers to define what we built.

When starting from scratch, the first thing we did was ask our power users what their biggest grievances were. It made knowing where to begin very easy.

Designing-while-engineering to MVP

The first priority was defining navigation architecture. This outlined every major experience I needed to design, and simultaneously set stakeholder expectations.

Core shopping experiences were highest priority, such as homepage. I devoted more time to core experiences since it was how the bulk of our revenue would be generated.

Even in an accelerated timeline, I constantly collected feedback from users and stakeholders so we could iterate and ship experiences that aligned with our users and market.

MVP Homepage that we landed on, including marketing and imagery for the holidays

I identified and flagged certain elements like navigation headers for iteration and extra engineering attention. These components were vital to users and single-handedly improved profit margins.

In other cases, I had to make the tough decision to design for foundational functionality instead of best-in-class design, so we could meet tight product deadlines.

Example: Sign in & sign up pages, refreshed to incorporate current marketing creative as a minimum.

All the way to the very end, every little detail was tweaked such as product tile metadata. This ensured that we would be able to communicate BevMo!'s prices and value more accurately to customers, improving order sale volume.

Live experience

See the redesigned site yourself at bevmo.com ↗

Reflection

Initial estimates of work were around 6 months. Condensing that amount of work into 2 months required me to not necessarily be a designer, but also become a product manager and at times an engineer.

Were I to take something like this again under such circumstances, I would seek to define certain expectations as early as possible. There are some instances, ex. filter functionality where we left designs and implementation strategy too late in the process, and ended up shipping something unideal. Something to consider the next time an e-commerce site is on its last legs.