Food and beverage
Redesign · CRO · 2025A seasoning brand that finally looked as good as it tastes
A family seasoning brand with twenty years of loyal customers and a store that undersold every one of them. A conversion-focused redesign on the Taste theme changed that.
+167%
Total sales
Shopify admin, last year vs previous, all channels
+108%
Orders
+70%
Conversion rate
to 3.63%
+45%
Sessions
The client
BuzRub is a family-owned seasoning brand from New England. The rub started as a recipe for family meals, and the formula has stayed essentially the same since around 2000. More than 10,000 bottles have sold across New England over about twenty years.
The lineup is simple: Original BuzRub (sweet and spicy, about 3 out of 5 heat), Al's Mild Blend (the same recipe without cayenne, about 1 out of 5), and a Combo Pack that bundles both.
- Client
- Ben Baltimore, BuzRub Seasoning
- Store
- buzrub.com
- Region
- New England
- Engagement
- Fixed-scope redesign and marketing services
The challenge
What was holding the store back
The original store was a basic Shopify setup: a charcoal header, one small product photo beside a quote from Buz, and three gray Shop Now buttons on a plain cream background. The brand's signature purple only appeared on the bottle label.
That is the kind of store that quietly falls behind. The product had a story and a following, but a first-time visitor saw none of it. The goals were clear: tell the family story, make Original versus Al's Mild obvious at a glance, give people an easy path to buy (including the Combo Pack), and put the brand color and food photography front and center.
What we did
The work, step by step
- Step 01
Rebuilt on the Taste theme around how people shop for a seasoning
Shopify's Taste theme gave us a food-first foundation. Instead of forcing the brand into a generic layout, every section was arranged around the question a shopper actually has: what does this taste like, and which one is for me?
- Step 02
A hero that sells in the first second
Deep brand purple, lifestyle food photography featuring the Original Blend, a 'Hey, Flavor Hunter' headline and a single yellow SHOP NOW button. One message, one action.
- Step 03
Brand purple carried through header, navigation and hero
The color that lived only on the bottle label now runs through the whole store, so the site and the product finally look like they belong to each other.
- Step 04
Mobile first, with food above the fold
On a phone the food photography stacks above the headline and the call to action, so the first thing a shopper sees is something they want to eat.
- Step 05
Product pages built to cross-sell
Each product page has flavor copy, ingredients, Add to cart with Shop Pay, and a 'You may also like' block that puts Al's Mild Blend and the discounted Combo Pack one tap away.
Before and after
Drag to compare
More from the build
Around the store
Results
What the numbers say
The redesigned store is live and selling. Shopify admin reports the following for the last year, all channels, compared with the previous period.
More visitors arrived, and a much larger share of them bought: orders more than doubled and total sales grew 167% while traffic grew 45%. That gap between traffic growth and sales growth is the redesign doing its job.
| Metric | Last year | Change |
|---|---|---|
| Sessions | 743 | +45% |
| Total sales | $828 | +167% |
| Orders | 27 | +108% |
| Conversion rate | 3.63% | +70% |
Source: Shopify admin, all channels, compared with the previous period.
- Platform
- Shopify
- Theme
- Taste, customized for conversion
- Deliverables
- Homepage redesign, brand color system, product pages with cross-sells, mobile layout, supporting store assets
- Engagement
- Fixed-scope project for Shopify development and marketing services
What clients say
“Working with Nick was great! He was great at communicating and asking questions about what I wanted. The store he provided was exactly what I wanted.”
Libby Varberg · Owner, libbymv.art
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