Blue Mountains Chocolate Company

I was working as a barista at Blue Mountains Chocolate Company when I noticed just how much of the business's presentation was being let down by its digital presence, and honestly, a fair bit of the physical stuff too. The website was in rough shape, the socials weren't doing much, and most of the in-store signage had been thrown together in an old version of Word and printed out. The brand itself had good bones though, especially on the packaging, it just wasn't showing through anywhere else.

I offered to help bring everything up to a consistent standard. Rather than creating a whole new brand, I took what was already working, mainly the product packaging, and used that as the foundation to refine and reinforce everything else. Product labels, opening hours signs, the open/closed sign, all of it was redesigned in Figma and exported as print-ready PDFs to replace the Word docs.

For the website, the owner was set on staying with Weebly since that's what he was comfortable managing, so I designed the new site in Figma and then did my best to recreate it within Weebly's fairly limited toolset. It wasn't always a perfect match but I got it close enough. A big part of the rebuild was turning on Weebly's ecommerce functionality, which had never been used. Being a tourist town, a huge number of customers were visitors who'd grab some chocolate on holiday and then have no way to reorder once they got home. That was a lot of low-hanging fruit just sitting there, and it was actually one of the main things that made the owner so keen to get my help.

I photographed all the products myself using a makeshift lightbox I rigged up on site with a cheap ring light and some canvas paper. Nothing fancy, but it did the job. On top of that I put together a set of social media templates that matched the refreshed branding, giving the socials a better starting point going forward.

The thing I'm most proud of with this project is the holistic approach. I didn't have formal branding experience at the time, but I had enough design sense and attention to detail to make sure everything was brought into line. Not just the website, but the signage, the photography, the socials, all of it. The brand was already there, it just needed someone to pull it all together.