Ha Ha Ha
Peeka & Co. is a North American online marketplace and resource hub catered towards modern parenting values and practices.
As a brand created by parents for parents, their mission is to help families raise their little ones with confidence, intention and mindfulness at heart.
We didn’t expect St. Joseph Communications — the Canadian publication giant behind Toronto Life, Maclean’s, Today’s Parent et al. — to tap us on the shoulder for help with their first official venture into e-commerce. But they did. We said, “Yes.” And thus, a collaboration was born.
Peeka & Co. is the brainchild of Commerce Studios, a D2C subsidiary team within the St. Joseph Communications family. The brand offers premium play essentials for children under the age of four, and educational resources primarily aimed at new parenthood. To ensure credibility, subject matter experts are consulted for both product curation and content creation.
In terms of their operational model, Peeka & Co. adopts a values-driven approach to commerce. Vendors are selected based on eight distinctive “Value Standards” (e.g. mom-owned, BIPOC-owned, ethically-produced, etc.), giving customers the opportunity to shop in alignment with their own personal beliefs.
Together with the founding stakeholders, we delivered a strong brand identity and launched a solid Shopify website that could carry their business plan through the next few critical years of growth.
Confirming who we’re designing for
Luckily for us, the client came into the project already equipped with personas and a rough site map, which we further extrapolated with our own ideas and expertise.
Everything we were about to create needed to be attractive, thoughtful and elegantly streamlined in order to win over two key customer profiles — financially secure “Millennial Mamas” first, and “Generous Gifters” second.
We began with designing a robust and resonant visual identity that could extend across various mediums (including the soon-to-be website that was also entrusted to us).
Our playful wordmark was paired with equally lively watercolour illustrations depicting abstract shapes and objects from nature. We chose a palette of soft pastels along with two contemporary fonts that would add the right touch of affluence, given the brand’s upscale market positioning and target audiences. (Our efforts were later confirmed through a successful round of user testing.)
Website backend and frontend considerations
Our entire development plan was characterized by the following priorities — satisfying a predefined list of features, ensuring reasonable ease of ongoing maintenance, and avoiding technical debt as much as possible.
Assembling the tech stack for this project was challenging, as third-party applications for Shopify are rarely fully compatible with each other. The most complex piece of the overall puzzle was the required integration with Convictional — a “supplier enablement platform” that essentially facilitates dropship automation at an enterprise level. (Convictional is used by the likes of major Canadian retailers such as Indigo, Simons and Harry Rosen.) We met with their solutions team on several occasions to fully acquaint with platform capabilities and align on data sync strategy.
Key technical accomplishments
As for the frontend, we needed to craft an experience that would look and feel especially cohesive, given that — through Convictional — all product data would be cloned directly from vendor source stores. Although this saves the client from having to prepare cumbersome files for catalogue upload, the unfortunate trade-offs are wildly inconsistent conventions for product naming, photography, copywriting and general taxonomy.
As part of our process, we established best practices for backend organization, and provided extensive hands-on training for everything from product data cleanup to sitewide content management.
Organizing the navigation menu was a noted point of healthy contention. We needed to help users easily browse through hundreds (and eventually thousands) of competing SKUs, while still adhering to specific non-negotiables put forth by the client. We ultimately landed on a system that would allow for multiple pathways of exploration — e.g. by category, by age group, by brand, by core values, etc. — without drowning out important utility elements and secondary links. We conducted prototype usability testing to refine our decisions and eliminate wrong assumptions.
On PLPs, we developed a custom “Quick View” modal that dynamically pulls in additional product metadata (e.g. matching core values, region exclusivity, etc.) beyond the standard details (e.g. title, price, variant options, description excerpt, etc.) to aid the user’s discovery process.
On PDPs, we focused on balancing product education against conversion efforts, knowing that our particular user personas would be less likely to shop impulsively (and certainly not without doing their own research beforehand). Our page layout includes a short brand profile and a recommended article for further reading, alongside the typical cross-sell and review modules.
By leaning on Shopify-inherent tools and third-party applications, we were also able to incorporate valuable features like localized currency, smart search, self-service returns, back-in-stock notifications, and a wishlist builder.
We upgraded Shopify’s native Blog functionality with our own metafield-powered enhancements, giving the client greater flexibility over the structure and presentation of their resource hub (aptly named “The Nurture”).
One notable improvement was adding the ability to handpick product recommendations per individual article (which is perfect for in-depth reviews and gift guides). We also made a custom landing page for the hub where the client could specify which articles appeared in the spotlight (rather than displaying the newest ones by default).
“I love this marketplace. The website is so easy to navigate. You can shop with confidence that the products are safe and sustainably made.”
Trish M., Actual Customer
