Raw Living Spirulina (Web)

Raw Living Spirulina grows fresh living spirulina at its farm in Vero Beach, Florida, and ships it direct to households across the continental United States. Every jar carries a harvest date instead of a best-by date. That one detail sets the rules for the business, and for the website.

The challenge

A jar stays inside the published freshness window for twelve days from harvest, a figure Raw Living Spirulina publishes on its own jars and pages. The farm harvests and dispatches on a weekly cycle. So this is not a catalog with a cart bolted on. It is the front end of a cold chain that has to put the right number of jars in the right households every week.

That gives the site two jobs. Explain a living whole food to someone who has only ever met spirulina in dried form. Then turn that understanding into a standing subscription, because the subscription is the business.

There is a third thing, and it is the one that shaped most of the decisions. This brand sells on evidence: harvest dates, published lab results, named people, a farm built for about 25 million dollars by its own owners. A site making that argument has to show its work on the page, not in a downloadable PDF.

What we built

We moved the whole site to Shopify and rebuilt it around the subscription instead of the single order. Delivery frequency, pausing, skipping a week and the longer renewal programs all sit where a first time buyer can see them before committing, not three screens into checkout.

Evidence sits on the product pages. The harvest date printed on each jar. The Eurofins results the farm publishes. The thirty six enclosed greenhouses the spirulina grows in. The people who sign off each harvest by name. We wrote none of that record. We put it where somebody deciding on a first order will read it.

Shipping is part of the sell, not fine print. The farm ships to the continental United States on a cold chain, on a weekly dispatch cycle, and the site says so plainly on the pages where it matters.

Search work for one market

Raw Living Spirulina sells in the continental United States and nowhere else, so the search work targets one market and one language. No alternate language versions, no regional splits, nothing to maintain twice. Research runs with a United States location and English, and the page plan follows what people there actually type when they are looking for fresh spirulina.

We also delivered the site architecture as a standalone document: every URL, what it is for and where it sits. The team can read the whole structure without opening the theme, which matters when the person asking the question is the founder and not a developer.

How the work ran

The migration came first, because nothing else can be decided while the store is still on the old platform. Then the structure, then the product pages, then search.

The architecture document did more work than we expected. It was written for the team, not for us, and it turned a long series of small questions into one page somebody could point at. Where does a renewal program live. Which page does a first time buyer land on from an email. What happens to a jar format that gets retired. Those answers only have to be given once if they are written down somewhere everybody can find them.

Every decision gets reviewed by the owners themselves. This is a company of five people with no HR department and no marketing department, where the founder signs off each harvest personally. That changes how a project runs. Nothing goes through a committee, and nothing gets approved by somebody who has not read it.

What keeps running

Maintenance and support run continuously, with a content program alongside them. In practice that means three things. The store keeps working. The pages keep getting better. And when something breaks on a dispatch morning, there is somewhere to send it.

What this one shows

Three things worth taking from it if you are weighing us up.

• We work inside the constraint instead of designing around it. The twelve day window is not an inconvenience to be downplayed. It is the strongest thing the brand has, and the site leads with it.
• Evidence beats adjectives. Lab results, harvest dates and named people, placed where the decision happens, do more than any amount of copy about quality.
• We stay after launch. Maintenance, support and content are part of the engagement, not an upsell once the invoice for the build has cleared.

The result

The store runs on Shopify with the subscription at the center, the evidence on the product pages and a URL plan the team can read on its own. One landing page is live today and the rest of the site is being built, so this one is in progress rather than finished.

The commerce stack behind the store, from the subscription engine to the accounting sync, has its own page: Raw Living Spirulina (Software).