A unified & functional Shopify store for a local hidden gem

Two platforms making simple admin hard

Carey's Secret Garden runs a garden space where visitors come to learn about plants and the ecosystem, alongside a programme of ecological projects that reintroduce plants and wildlife. The garden opens across the seasons and offers far more than entry: workshops, courses, and events such as foraging, planting, and yoga, plus an online range of plants, fragrances, and gifts.

The problem was that all of this sat across two platforms. Ticketing ran through a supplier called AirSquare, and the website was hosted on Squarespace. Running the business across two systems made everyday admin harder than it needed to be, and the team had hit real frustrations setting up different events online.

Carey's Secret Garden came to Salo to build an e-commerce store that could carry the whole offer: booking for days out, workshops, courses, and events, plus the online shop for plants and gifts. The store had to handle the things that make event booking awkward, capacity in particular, while staying simple to run behind the scenes.

One platform to run tickets, courses & shop

The first phase was discovery. Rather than assume a platform, we started by working out what would actually suit the business, weighing the opportunities in staying on the existing platforms against re-platforming, against everything the store needed to do.

The recommendation was to move to Shopify and let one platform handle the e-commerce, the booking, and the point-of-sale system together. Consolidating onto a single platform was the decision that addressed the root problem: it removed the split between two systems and made setting up events far simpler from an administrative point of view.

Carey's Secret Garden already had a brand they loved, so the work was not about reinventing the look. We took that existing brand identity and designed the website around it. Because Shopify booking depends on the booking applications available for the platform, we designed within those constraints to find the best possible experience for the user, taking time to understand the full variety of events and workshops and how each one would be sold.

The process ran in a clear order: wireframe, then design, then build. That sequence kept the structure and the user journey settled before the visual design and the build went ahead.

Booking and browsing brought under one brand

We delivered a Shopify store that brings ticketing, workshops, courses, events, and the online shop together in one place, designed around the garden's existing brand. The two-platform split that had been making admin harder was removed, and creating events online was made simpler for the team to manage day to day.