Luvo completely breaks the mold for a frozen foods company. Instead of being the unhealthy last resort at the back of the freezer, Luvo is on a mission to create high quality, delicious frozen foods that turn healthy eating into the easy choice.

Fans of Luvo are superfans and sing their praises, but their website wasn’t singing loud enough. When they came to us, they wanted to revamp their ecommerce platform and look at new ways to customize the experience. We wanted to make sure their digital foundation capitalized on their greatest asset — their story.

With Luvo, we first explored a “Build-A-Bowl” concept they had that would let customers create and order customized meals. The complex logistics of fulfilling those orders would require new logistics partners and large orders from all customers, but had the potential to increase sales and create loyalty. We hypothesized that we could hit those same goals another way: with a strong digital foundation. Validating this hypothesis with early stage user testing confirmed that the most impact would come from a website that clearly communicates Luvo’s mission and supports sales by integrating with their ecommerce platform.

With this foundation set, we needed a way to encourage users to place bigger orders: customized results and product bundles. With key filters set up, users could plan their meals based on dietary needs, preferences, or goals and even choose themed bundles — such as all of Luvo’s gluten-free dishes. By providing a personalized experience and validating the desire for large orders, it would tell Luvo if Build-A-Bowl would be worth the investment in logistics.

Luvo’s previous site was split down the middle: a Wordpress site for their brand story and marketing and Shopify for ecommerce. With a strong content marketing effort on their blog, we needed to support a system that kept their content, but found a way to seamlessly connect that content with the ecommerce experience. The challenge was this solution would need to adjust depending on the customer’s location — ecommerce is only available to US customers.

For our initial launch, we would enable Luvo to integrate ecommerce options throughout the Wordpress site, provide total geolocational flexibility for the American versus Canadian experience, provide filters to personalize the shopping experience, and implement the ability to sell themed bundles.

In order to bring this to life, we guided Luvo through our agile and collaborative process. Designers at both companies worked closely together, and we adopted an agile adaptive deployment model that allowed for multiple successful releases of increasingly robust feature sets on the site. It meant Luvo had something improved fast, and something great soon after.

In this version of the site, we didn’t set out to turn the basis of ecommerce upside down. Instead, we communicated a clear story and applied proven tactics and technologies in a smart manner. We wrote custom scripts that enabled product bundles and filtering. This meant we were leveraging the best of Wordpress and the best of Shopify — getting a lot more out of Shopify than you can straight out of the box. For those exploring the Luvo site, we integrated an Algolia search solution that fed customers a mix of relevant products and blog content whenever they searched.