Once you’ve tasted Nong’s khao man gai (and THE sauce) you’ll know why she’s considered a Portland legend.
When Nong reached out looking for a quote to redo her website, I had to pinch myself. It turns out she not only runs one of the most well-known food establishments in Portland, but she's also a wonderful human to boot. I designed and built the expanding business a new website on Shopify that captured Nong’s creative spirit, integrated the restaurant side of the business, and was better suited for the company's growing eCommerce needs.
Roles: UX/UI Design, Shopify Web Development, Branding Work
When Nong first reached out about building her new website she had two successful restaurants and was starting to bottle her sauce to sell online and in stores. She was using a Square site that she had built herself years ago and no longer met her needs. She was continuing to use Square as her restaurant POS system which worked great in store, but didn't provide enough options for her to successfully sell and ship her sauce across the US.
The goal was to build a website that integrated the various aspects of her multi-faceted business. The top two priorities were:
To make the restaurant information such as menu items, open hours, and takeout services easy to find
To make it effortless for users to shop her sauces and merchandise online
Nong had recently had some branding work done for her in-store sauce marketing materials, and had various other photo and video assets. She didn’t have the budget to do a whole branding redesign, so the challenge was to create something cohesive with what was available and make the online brand match the in-store brand.
I dove in head first pulling in colors and graphics from the new package designs, editing old product photography to match the new style, editing an array of YouTube video clips together to tell a story, and designing a site that wove the core of her business into one website.
For the Nong's Khao Man Gai Shopify build I chose a theme that met a lot of the criteria we were looking and then began the work of customizing the various templates, creating new templates, sections, and snippets, and transforming the site to capture the liveliness and heart of the Nong’s brand.
Not only does the new site include a way for Nong's company to sell sauce online and convey information about the restaurants, but it also houses recipes, tells the Nong's origin story, shows off press and media accomplishments, all while giving users an insight into why this Portland legend is so special.