Concept · Floral studio

Flowers that keep the season

A floral studio whose stock changes every week. The design problem is that the thing worth showing is also the thing that goes out of date fastest.

Type
Concept — self-directed
Sector
Floral studio
Typeface
Fraunces for display, Archivo for text
Palette
  • #A8BA9F
  • #263A2A
  • #5F2A19
  • #1C2A20
Sage ground, deep green, clay

The premise

A small floral studio taking weddings, weekly arrangements and walk-in stems. The kind of business whose Instagram is excellent and whose website is a form from 2016.

The problem

Most florist sites open with a stock photograph of roses and bury what is actually in the bucket this week. But seasonality is the whole argument for buying from a studio instead of a supermarket — and it is the one thing a template cannot hold, because it changes every seven days.

The approach

Put the week first

The page opens on what is in the studio right now, not on a hero image that will be true all year. That single decision reorders everything below it: ordering follows the stems rather than leading them, and the seasonal claim is demonstrated instead of asserted.

A serif that can be soft without being fussy

Fraunces in italic carries the display type. It has the warmth the subject wants and enough structure not to tip into wedding-invitation pastiche, which is the failure mode for every florist brand.

Green as ink, not as decoration

The deep green is used for type and rules rather than as a background wash, so it reads as the studio's colour rather than as a theme applied over the top. Brass does the small accents.

Weddings kept separate

Wedding work is a different sale with a different timeline, so it gets its own section rather than being mixed into the weekly list — one visitor is buying in ten minutes and the other in ten months.

What I would want before building it for real

The seasonal block is the part that would need a real content plan behind it. A page that promises this week's flowers and shows last month's is worse than one that never promised.

Botanica concept site design, full page.
The full page. Open the live concept

This is a concept, not client work. Botanica is not a real business. The site was designed and built end to end to work through a specific problem, and it is shown here as design thinking rather than as a job I was hired to do.