Redefining gluten-free baking
As a trained pastry chef and master cake decorator, Gillian Muralles spent years working in some of Southern California’s most acclaimed bakeries. When she was diagnosed with celiac disease, she decided to redefine gluten-free baking. Impossibly moist layer cakes, decadent desserts, and tender crumbs are not what gluten-free baking is known for. Yet, at Lilac Patisserie and Café, the bakery that Gillian and her husband Alam founded in 2015, these are the things that keep customers coming back—whether they eat gluten or not.
Helping a small business play big
Buoyed by a loyal local following and glowing national press, Lilac’s business was growing when we were asked to design and develop its new website. The site needed to help the small business play big by streamlining its increasingly complex operations, which included café, café to-go, bakery, custom cakes, catering, and ecommerce.
Making business a piece of cake
The site we created for Lilac was designed to be a de facto back office for the business. Key functionality included an integrated ecommerce storefront, online ordering for the café, POS system integration to streamline price and menu changes across the business, a system for automating cake tastings, and large, organized image galleries to better merchandise Lilac’s works of edible art.
A delicious user experience
In addition to creating operational efficiencies, Lilac’s new website needed to help enhance the user experience on and offline. We accomplished this by elevating the look and feel of the site to improve the brand’s presentation. We simplified the homepage design, site navigation and content hierarchy to drive sales and inquiry conversions. We created a dedicated mobile experience to facilitate on-the-go ordering and café foot traffic. And we gave Lilac a creative style that was elegant without taking itself too seriously.
Brand strategy
Visual identity refresh
Website design
Copywriting
Website development
“Truss Creative was great to work with for the roll-out of our new website. They had impeccable vision and really captivated the essence of our brand and made it possible to communicate it to our customers in a visually beautiful and functional way.”
80% increase in mobile ecommerce conversions
26% increase in desktop ecommerce conversions
51+% increase in overall conversions
64.78% growth in revenue
20% decrease in overall bounce rate
32% increase in overall page visits
10% increase in overall session duration
The results
Our work gave Lilac the brand and digital infrastructure it needed to streamline and grow its business—even while the coronavirus pandemic continued to disrupt café business well into 2021. Period-over-period (Jan 2021–June 2021 / July 2021–Dec 2021) , analytics show gains on virtually every ecommerce KPI for Lilac’s new website, including time on site, order value, and total revenue.
