Development UX Design Food & Beverage

Hawaii Coffee Company

Rebuilding a Heritage Multi-Brand Storefront on BigCommerce

INPUT · THE CHALLENGE

The Challenge

Hawaii Coffee Company's BigCommerce storefront was overdue for a refresh. The shopping experience didn't reflect the heritage, warmth, or premium positioning of the brand portfolio. Generic templating made it hard to tell the story behind each category, and shoppers buying bulk or large-bag SKUs ran into friction at the variant level.

Subscription was a strategic priority, but its presence on the site was inconsistent. A planned migration from the legacy OrderGroove implementation to OrderGroove's new app loomed on the horizon, and Hawaii Coffee Company didn't want to rebuild the same surface twice. They needed a partner who could modernize the storefront on BigCommerce without disrupting subscriptions, bring category storytelling into product browsing, tighten conversion levers in the cart, set the foundation for the new OrderGroove app, and bake in accessibility from day one.

STATUS · DIAGNOSING

The Brand

Hawaii Coffee Company is the parent house behind some of Hawaii's most loved heritage coffee and tea labels: Lion Coffee (America's oldest major coffee brand, in Hawaii since 1979), Royal Kona Coffee, Royal Hawaiian Coffee, Hawaiian Islands Tea Company, and the premium 100% Kona estate brand KOA Coffee.

Based in Honolulu, Hawaii Coffee Company brings small-batch, island-roasted product to coffee lovers around the world through wholesale, retail, and a fast-growing direct-to-consumer channel. The storefront has to do a lot at once: tell the story of multiple heritage brands, merchandise a deep catalog of single-origin and blended SKUs, support gifting and bulk buyers, and run a real subscription program, all without losing the warmth of the aloha experience.

Our Approach

DYODE opened the engagement with a structured discovery sprint locking in requirements, auditing the existing experience, and aligning on brand standards across Hawaii Coffee Company's portfolio. From there, our design team produced high-fidelity mockups grounded in Hawaii Coffee Company's existing brand language (volcanic terroir, aloha hospitality, premium island provenance), modernizing the layout patterns and component library underneath without losing the personality that defines each label.

We selected and customized BigCommerce's Tea & Coffee theme as the base, then layered in the bespoke functionality the brand actually needed: category-level A+ content, custom shipping progress bars, gift options, unique variant URLs, and a pre-selected large-bag SKU flow.

In parallel, we kept the legacy OrderGroove implementation stable on the Hawaii Coffee Company storefront and laid the groundwork for the new OrderGroove app, which we delivered against on the sister-brand KOA Coffee store the following year, including code migration, SMI prep, and PDP subscription style fixes. That same pattern is now ready to roll forward across the rest of the portfolio.

What We Shipped

A modern, mobile-first BigCommerce storefront built on the Tea & Coffee theme and tuned to Hawaii Coffee Company's multi-brand voice and deep catalog. Category-level A+ content modules across up to eight product collections (Kona, Hawaiian, blends, flavored, decaf, tea, gifting), each telling its own story without bespoke PDPs for every SKU.

A custom shipping progress bar with a $5-over-$29 threshold raising AOV without giving away free shipping outright, implemented in both the main cart and the popout cart. Gift messaging and gift wrap support in cart and popout cart, critical for Hawaii Coffee Company's gifting-heavy seasonality. Variant URL routing so each product variation gets its own canonical URL, better for SEO, sharing, and paid media. Large-bag SKU pre-selection via URL parameter, smoothing the path for bulk and B2B buyers landing from ads or email.

Legacy OrderGroove subscriptions stabilized on launch, with a clean handoff path to the new OrderGroove app. Accessibility hardening via the global AccessiBe widget plus a dedicated audit-and-fix pass on site speed and ADA compliance. Full cross-browser, cross-device QA before handoff.

Phase Two: OrderGroove App Upgrade on KOA Coffee

A year after the relaunch, DYODE returned to migrate the KOA Coffee storefront off the legacy OrderGroove implementation and onto OrderGroove's new app. The engagement included removing legacy code, prepping the new app's SMI location, and refreshing the subscription option styling on the product detail page. The migration pattern proved out on KOA is ready to extend back across the broader Hawaii Coffee Company portfolio when timing aligns.