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Julia's Kombucha

Role

Tools

Context

Web/Branding Designer, Business Consultant 

Figma, FigJam

Building a scalable digital presence for a growing artisan brand

Duration 

May 2025-present

Bottle.jpg

PROJECT OVERVIEW

Julia’s Kombucha is a small-batch, unpasteurised kombucha brand based in Edinburgh, stocked by 30 local cafés, restaurants, and whole food stores. Known for its authentic taste and probiotic benefits, the brand uses a traditional fermentation process with no added COâ‚‚.

 

As it scales, Julia’s Kombucha is seeking to establish a digital presence to better serve its wholesale partners, improve brand visibility, and prepare for future direct-to-consumer (D2C) opportunities.

THE PROBLEM

Julia’s Kombucha currently operates without a digital ordering system, relying instead on manual email communication with stockists. This creates inefficiencies such as unclear product availability, delayed responses, and difficulty forecasting demand issues that directly impact a small one-person team managing production, delivery, and invoicing in-house.

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Simultaneously, there is no online web presence apart from on Instagram so customers have limited visibility into where the product is available and what makes it unique, hindering brand discovery and trust. Without a centralised digital hub, Julia’s Kombucha is missing key opportunities to educate consumers and capture interest from health-conscious buyers.​​

RATIONALE

I chose Julia’s Kombucha because it offers a unique opportunity to collaborate closely with a founder-led business at a pivotal moment in its growth. The absence of an existing digital infrastructure provides a rare, blank-slate scenario to apply foundational UX principles with a direct and measurable impact. Julia had been working on her website and felt stuck.

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This context allows for a nuanced exploration of how UX design can support operational efficiency, customer engagement, and business scalability. The insights gathered directly from the founder and stockists enable a richly informed redesign grounded in real user needs and business constraints.

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Reimagining this website goes beyond surface aesthetics, it demonstrates how strategic UX can shape the trajectory of a brand, transform analogue processes, and future-proof a business for broader distribution and evolving customer behaviours. When working with Julia I considered a number of customer touch points, from discovery to recommendation.

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This redesign aims to:
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  • Streamline B2B ordering through a reorder form (eventually an integrated stockist portal).

  • Improve product visibility with clearer flavour information.

  • Enable discovery via a stockist map and future email subscriptions.

  • Lay the groundwork for a scalable direct-to-consumer experience.

USER RESEARCH

THE CUSTOMER

Two core user groups were identified based on business operations and early user research:

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Persona 1 - Health-Conscious Consumer (B2C)


Goals: Easily discover the product, trust its quality, and find nearby stockists or future subscription options.

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Personas.jpg
Persona 2 - Café Owner/Stockist (B2B)


Goal: Quickly and reliably restock popular flavours with minimal admin, visibility into inventory, and order history.

Persona1.jpg

These personas formed the foundation, allowing me to identify assumptions about the customer base, and identify the two main segments, our B2C Consumer and our B2B Stockist, which meant designing for two distinct user groups.

CRITIQUING THE CURRENT DRAFT

Current Website - Critique

We spent some time talking about the customers and what information or service they would need when landing on the website. Using previous knowledge from Heuristic Analysis, I made some suggestions for changes.

Home Page
Homepage.jpg

Critique

  • Too much copy, text body too long

  • Image too personal/casual

  • White text not accessible on light green background.

  • Company name not visible at top of page


Suggestions

  • Simplify structure of homepage, inclduing main image of product, key CTA and tagline

  • Colour contrast check, change colour scheme to improve readability.

  • Establish clear brand guidelines*

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*This project, as a friend of the founder began to grow arms and legs and I am now working on a visual re-branding for Julia's Kombucha.

Product Specification
Ingredients - Product Page.jpg

Critique

  • Poorly structured, with no context to which ingredients are in which products

  • Unclear to which products are available 

  • Beautiful photos but we don't know what they are off without prior knowledge. ​​

 

Suggestions

  • Adding all available flavours with sale price and high quality product images.

  • Coming soon banner with CTA that allows visitors to sign up to be notifying by email when D2C website sales will be available

  • Clear breadcrumb menu so that visitors can see their location on the site

  • Optional section below for benefits of specific ingredients for health conscious customers

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Where to find me?

Critique

  • Too much information ​

  • Unstructured, misaligned elements

  • Bad contract for accessibility of text

  • No information of address or links 

 

Improvements

  • Simplified list of stockists, removing individual images

  • Replace individual images for each with stockist spotlight carousel below, as too much information

  • Subcategories by region

  • Reducing amount of copy to reduce cognitive load.

  • Interactive map feature that allows visitors to find the nearest stockist location

Contact
Get in Touch.jpg
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