Diaspora Co. — Single-Origin Spice DTC Storefront on Shopify
A Shopify storefront for a single-origin spice brand sourcing from 150+ family farms across India and Sri Lanka. Roughly 40 SKUs — whole spices, ground spices, blends — plus tools, swag, gifting and a cookbook. The build's defining work is in the cart: a multi-tier progressive-reward drawer (free spice spoons, then free shipping, then a mystery gift), a "pack" mechanic that nudges tin counts to cut shipping cost, last-minute add-ons, and a receipt-upload flow granting free shipping to customers who donate to a relief cause. Supporting it are recipe content with difficulty levels, audio pronunciations for spice names, a store locator for wholesale, rewards, and back-in-stock and preorder capture
Diaspora Co. — Single-Origin Spice DTC Storefront on Shopify
A Shopify storefront for a single-origin spice brand sourcing from 150+ family farms across India and Sri Lanka. Roughly 40 SKUs — whole spices, ground spices, blends — plus tools, swag, gifting and a cookbook. The build's defining work is in the cart: a multi-tier progressive-reward drawer (free spice spoons, then free shipping, then a mystery gift), a "pack" mechanic that nudges tin counts to cut shipping cost, last-minute add-ons, and a receipt-upload flow granting free shipping to customers who donate to a relief cause. Supporting it are recipe content with difficulty levels, audio pronunciations for spice names, a store locator for wholesale, rewards, and back-in-stock and preorder capture
The brief
The challenge, and how we approached it
01
The challenge
Spice tins are low-ticket and ship badly — a single $13 tin is uneconomic to fulfil. The store has to raise basket size on nearly every order without discounting a brand whose whole proposition is paying farmers 3–5× commodity price. It also has to carry a large sourcing and ethics story, plus recipes, without turning into a magazine that doesn't sell.
02
Our approach
The cart does the work. A stacked reward ladder (spoons → free shipping → mystery gift) gives the shopper three reasons to keep adding, and a pack-fill prompt tells them exactly how many more tins complete a shipping unit and what it saves — framing AOV growth as a logistics benefit rather than an upsell. Last-minute add-ons sit inside the drawer. Elsewhere: a comparison table pitting the brand against supermarket and other spice companies on origin, wages, harvest dates and fillers; recipes tagged by difficulty and course as the discovery layer; audio pronunciations and farm-partner naming as the cultural layer; and back-in-stock, preorder and waitlist capture across a catalogue where much of the range sells out.
What we built
Six capabilities shipped for Dana's Bakery
Each one solves a specific part of the brief above.
ZIP-gated shipping
Real-time validation prevents invalid ZIP purchases from entering cart
Drop architecture
Pre-staged inventory with countdown, sold-out gates, and waitlist
Gifting flow
Message cards, recipient addressing, scheduled delivery, gift wrap
Perishable inventory
Daily inventory sync with cold-chain capacity constraints
Drop-day performance
Theme architecture handles 20× traffic spikes without latency
Recurring orders
Holiday subscription flow for repeat gifters
How it ran
10 weeks build, in four stages
Every engagement runs the same four stages, so you always know what happens next and what you owe us at each one.
Stage 1
Audit and scope
We review the current theme, apps and analytics, then write a fixed-scope SOW with named deliverables and a date.
Stage 2
Design and build
Work happens in a dev store on a Git-backed workflow. You get a preview link from week one, not a reveal at the end.
Stage 3
QA and launch
Cross-browser and device QA, redirect map, analytics verification, then a launch window agreed with you rather than dropped on you.
Stage 4
Hypercare
Fourteen to sixty days of included post-launch support while real traffic finds the edge cases.
The outcome
Where Dana's Bakery landed
Conversion is up 2.1× after the PDP rebuild, AOV is up 34% year-over-year thanks to gifting upsells, and drop days are now smooth — zero downtime across 12 drops in the past year.
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★
★
★
★
★
Every drop day was a stress event before. Now they're just a Tuesday. The team built us infrastructure we can actually grow on.
FounderDiaspora Co
Tech stack
What this project runs on
The exact platform, services and integrations behind the build.
Commerce platform
Shopify Plus
Launchpad
Shopify Functions
Online Store 2.0
Engineering
Custom ZIP validator
Growth and operations
Klaviyo
ShipBob
More case studies
Other work worth reading
Long-form studies from the same team, with the numbers behind them.
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