Fun & function WordPress website for Japanese street food brand, Eatchu

Eatchu is a Bristol-based mega-tasty Japanese food establishment and online shop, and one of our most favourite lunchtime haunts – both for the irresistible dumplings and the friendly chats. Since launching in 2016 at Bristol’s Harbourside Market, Guy & Vic’s business has proved extremely popular with the lunchtime crowd, and they now trade from their gyoza shop just across the alley from us, in the Old Mess Room at St Nicks Market. "Working with Studio Cotton to build our website was an absolute blast! As regular customers of ours, the team already had an excellent understanding of our business and our dumplings, and so it was great to work with people who are as passionate about our product as we are." Eatchu were already familiar with the WordPress platform, but felt frustrated by the limitations of the theme they were using. They couldn’t achieve what they needed for their brilliant small business. Our mission was to launch an online shop to sell produce to eager customers, and to deepen their limited (but lovely) branding. The first step was a touch of brand refinement. Besides their cute and kooky logo and the sweet animated characters, Eatchu only had one font – Hanken – which meant there wasn’t a visual content hierarchy for text. We always recommend 2-3 fonts for a website/branding, so we added their body font, Space Mono. Adding a second font made the content more readable, and way more likely to be understood and remembered. As super sleuths over here at Studio Cotton, we had a browse of the Eatchu Instagram page and found a picture of their in-house menu to use as a reference for their online menu. We replicated the layout, and echoed the dotted border design throughout the website. Food menus are notoriously tricky to make mobile responsive, meaning many restaurants and cafes resort to creating a downloadable PDF for their online menu instead. There’s no such compromise here. We perfected every pixel, allowing every dumpling-lover to get the full menu experience whether they’re on a desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone. Made to be fun and a bit silly, Eatchu’s Japanese inspired website was initially launched a few weeks before Christmas. Luckily, our design is also incredibly efficient, allowing Guy & Vic to really quickly pivot the business during the COVID-19 pandemic. Within 3 days of having to shut due to the pandemic, we got their shop online offering frozen gyoza. Being able to adapt to receive these online orders created a crazy conversion rate of 6.9% – they completely sold out of dumplings in 2 days. We have had so much positive feedback on the website and our online store, and we love it too. The ecommerce platform was thankfully up and running in time for lockdown which meant we were able to continue trading and to focus on the frozen delivery side of our business. Studio Cotton are continually enhancing the Eatchu website for new and exciting business ventures, as well as providing strategic support, whatever the world chucks at us next. We’re also exploring a future filled with email marketing and social media support too, so keep your peepers peeled for more exciting gyoza things.