Mrs Sourdough Bakery

The challenge

Mrs Sourdough had a cult local following, a waiting list for their weekend loaves, and a fragile Wix site that had been taped together over five years. Orders were coming in through four different channels — the website form, Instagram DMs, phone calls, email — and the owner was personally reconciling them every morning.

Two things were bleeding the business: the site couldn't handle peak load on a Friday morning (it crashed during every BBC Radio Kent mention), and they had no subscription or pre-order system, so every customer had to re-place the same weekly order manually.

What we did

• Rebuilt on Shopify with a custom theme tuned for artisan food retail — a hero-first layout, strong photography, and a product grid that handles long descriptions without looking cluttered.
• Built a pre-order / subscription system using Recharge, so regulars can lock in their weekly sourdough with one click.
• Streamlined the checkout — two steps, address autocomplete, Apple Pay and ShopPay enabled from day one.
• Set up a Klaviyo flow that catches abandoned carts, wins back lapsed subscribers, and turns first-time buyers into second-time buyers.
• Ran local SEO — 30 locally-focused pages for each village we deliver to, Google Business Profile optimisation, and a monthly content plan.

Results

Three months in, weekly online orders had more than tripled, and the subscription base was doing 42% of Friday volume before the shop opened. Checkout conversion lifted from 1.8% to 4.9% — customers were hitting the buy button and actually getting through. The Radio Kent dread disappeared: peak traffic days now convert at their highest rates.

A year on, Mrs Sourdough are onto a second bakery unit and running three pop-ups a month — infrastructure that the old site couldn't have carried them through.