Research

Toria’s Treasure Trove is a hobby turned small creative business. One of my favorite things to do in my downtime is to crochet. I’ve already sold a few things I’ve made and I’d like to one day create a website to do this more regularly as a side business.

I follow a multitude of other crocheters on social media to study what they make, sell, and post on social. If I become social media focused in my strategy, my target audience will be younger women (20s), who still love plushies. If I were to focus on craft fairs and selling in person, while still driving traffic to my website, my primary target audience will be moms and grandmas looking for toys for their kids as well as those younger women.

Ideation

Here I’ve created personas for two of the above mentioned target audience. The younger woman who reads fantasy on the weekends surrounded by her homemade plushies and works a regular job during the week. The older woman has grandkids who would love a plushie that looks just like their dog or favorite cartoon character for their birthday.

The story board features the young woman who sees that Toria’s Treasure Trove just release new keychains in her sea creatures series. She and her friends love the animals depicted and so she decides to get one for herself and each of her friends as a friendship memento.

Conceptualize

A shopping website, especially one for a small business needs to be straight forward and easy to navigate. I kept things simple, my business doesn’t have much more to offer than shopping and a shopping cart, so that’s all that made it into the navigation bar. Of course you want easy access to social media so I included that in the header as well. The two search pages have the ability to sign up for email notifications, an important feature to build your engaged audience.

Production

I’ve had the logo designed and the colors picked for my hobby for a few years. It was fun to pick the primary, secondary and accent colors that worked best in a website setting. The blue creates a great accent color to the purples that I use as my primary colors. It really pops and draws the eye.

I’ve included a short walkthrough here so you can see some of the interactive elements I’ve put into place.