Case study·Handmade food
A brand, a website and an online shop for handmade chutney.
Ama's Rustic Pantry, in Cambridge. Malaysian recipes made a few jars at a time, with nothing to build on at the start - no logo, no label, no address to send anybody to. Ours since 2026.
It started with recipes and a kitchen
Rani cooks the food she grew up with in Malaysia, in a kitchen in Cambridge, and her family had spent years telling her to do something with it. What she wanted was not a restaurant. It was to make chutney a few jars at a time and sell it to people who would appreciate it.
This meant starting at the beginning. There was no logo, no label, no cards, no website and nowhere to take a payment. We drew the logo, designed the label and the print, built the site around her story and put a shop underneath it - and since 2026 the domain, the web and email hosting and the upkeep have all sat with us. One person to ask, which matters more when the business is one person.
Also, we have been on hand with advice on running her business because, well ... we like to overdeliver.
The logo, the label and in person marketing
Once the logo was designed, we then had everything it had to make sit on: the jar, a business card, the compliment slip that goes in the box. Rani's own review mentions that the printers had positive comments on the label.
And the rules, written down
A logo is a file. A brand is the set of rules that keeps it right when somebody else is setting it - a label printer, a sign writer, whoever touches it after us.
Our website build
Scroll through, or go and buy a jar.
A jar of chutney costs six pounds. Nobody fills in an enquiry form for six pounds - either they can buy it in the next half minute or they close the tab and forget the whole thing. So the site is built to end in a basket, and every part of it points that way.
The rest of the page is the reason to want one. Where the recipes came from, who makes them, what to eat them with, how long a jar keeps - all of it on the same page as the buying, because a small food brand sells on the person behind it and there is no second visit to explain it in.
Under the bonnet
A shop with one product does not need a shopping platform. It would weigh it down and make security updates potentially difficult.
The usual answer is a large e-commerce system with a catalogue, tax classes, shipping zones and a wall of reports, all of it loading on every page. It's overkill.
So, we wrote the cart instead. It does the things this shop actually needs: a basket, a Stripe checkout, delivery zones and the email afterwards. It's a powerful little plugin and does more now than when we originally made it!
Something else worth shouting about ... we charged for the time to set up the plugin ... not for the time it took to design the plugin. As it turned into a full blown product, we decided she can enjoy it at no additional cost.
It was built for this site, and then it turned out to be the answer for anyone selling a handful of things rather than a catalogue. So we finished it properly and it is now Bang! Cart, a plugin of our own in the WordPress directory with paying customers on it. Ama's Rustic Pantry is where it came from, and it is still running on it.
The site, the domain, the web and email hosting all sit with us too, so when something needs doing there is one person to ask. Hosting includes SSL, Timeline Backups of the site and its database, malware scanning and server maintenance, with edge caching through our CDN so a page is served from a node near whoever is reading it.
Design for a whole business
One person, one product (so far) and nothing already in place. Everything a customer sees - on the screen, on the jar and through the letterbox - was made from scratch.
What Rani said about it
Rani ViknarajaAma's Rustic PantryGoogle reviewAndy has been working on several aspects of our chutney business matters and his work has been exemplary! Andy's web design with a logo to our specification and appropriate choice of colors and images is awesome and has been commented on by several family members and friends.
We also have a personalized email which was set up by Andy. Although Andy doesn't usually do designs for labels, he did ours and in fact the company that printed the labels were very impressed with the design! Andy went a step further and designed our business cards and compliment slips to make a lasting impression. We will recommend Andy/Bang Graphics with absolutely no hesitation!
Making something and want to sell it properly?
Tell us what you make and how you want it to arrive, and we will tell you what it takes to get there.
The call is with Andy, the person
who will primarily be working on your project.
