The Idea
To build a platform that allows people to discover and purchase meat, dairy and poultry from farms, large and small, across the entire country. People shouldn't be limited to the options supplied by their local grocery chains. They should be able to find the products they want that satisfy their dietary and conscious needs.
Whether it is: grain fed or grass fed, halal or kosher compliant, local or abroad, wild or domestic, Home Grown Cow makes finding your farm or your products easy and fun.
The Challenge
How do you build a marketplace where consumers can search, discover and purchase products from thousands of farms across the country? With thousands of products and farms, we had to build a real-time search engine that allowed users to filter by farm practices, certifications, cultural practices, location and much more.
Farmers are not the best store admins, so we had to build a system that allowed them to contact customers, alter orders based on inventory and ensure customer satisfaction.
Core Requirements
- Multi-Vendor E-Commerce
- Full E-Commerce functionality
- Order Fulfillment
- Accept, Modify and Decline orders
- Order from multiple farms
- Messaging system for customers and farmers
Rebuilding a Logo
before 
after Home Grown Cow already had an existing brand, but they wanted to explore freshening its look up to coincide with their new website launch. kohactive presented a logo and a couple of brand marketing concepts focused on Home Grown Cow’s target audience: urban millennials. Sometimes a client’s attachment to their logo is too difficult to sever, especially when their daughter drew it. No worries, the drawing was cleaned up, vectorized and given a slew of layout and color options to fit the demands of having a modern-day digital presence.
Custom Icons
A growing list of products, certifications, and standards called for a custom icon set that could be tagged onto individual products and farms to portray to the user which standards they adhere to.
Multi-vendor e-commerce
One of the biggest challenges of this project was building a multi-vendor e-commerce platform. The system had to allow farms to register, add products, keep up with inventory and fulfill orders with ease.
Since different regions have different names for their products (for example, a Kansas City strip is the same as a New York strip), product creation can easily complicate searching from the user's end. To make product creation easy, we seeded the database with hundreds of base products that vendors could use to describe their products. This allows consumers to look for either product and find the same products, regardless of the name.
Order Fulfillment
Fulfillment is always a large task for any e-commerce platform. We built our platform on top of Spree and completely customized the system. Spree is only built for one vendor, so we had to build a multi-vendor cart and fulfillment system.
Vendors can add one or multiple shipping locations. Some products are limited to certain states based on their certifications. This logic had to be built into a few different parts of the platform, including search and checkout.
The back-end automatically calculates shipping rates and creates shipping labels for the vendors to print and send to customers.
The Design
A clean, fun and intuitive user interface
Search & Discover
The design and user experience focuses on search and discovery. The sidebar allows users to easily filter results based on a variety of preferences, including location, certifications, practices and keywords.
Multi-Farm Purchases
Home Grown Cow offers products from hundreds of different farms. In order to create a simple and seamless experience, we built a checkout process that enables users to buy from multiple farms with a single order. The order is then split up and sent off to the appropriate farms.
