UX strategy for an established beekeeping business

Facilitating alignment between stakeholders of a 50 year old small beekeeping business seeking to modernize their presence to inspire a younger audience about sustainability, low scale farming and quality food.

Background
Emanueli Miele is a small family business with humble roots in the province of Piacenza in Italy. It has been operating for 40 years since its founder, Vincenzo, built the business on his own from the ground up and has kept it running thanks to a small but loyal customer base that includes individual consumers and other small businesses. 
For a few years now, Vincenzo's son, Francesco, has taken over the business with a new outlook and new goals in mind. With strong values rooted in regeneration and a clear grasp of the impact climate change has on bee colonies, Francesco believes the Emanueli Miele brand can expand its outreach to a younger customer base. By modernizing its look and feel and building an online presence but still keeping its humble roots intact, Francesco's goal is to turn the Emanueli brand into a means to offer sustainable, balanced, and small-scale farming education that can inspire and empower the Italian community and international visitors alike.
Goals
Our goal is to expand the presence and positioning of the Emanueli Miele brand to reach a more modern market.
To do this, we will design, prototype and test a website for mobile and web that allows visitors to:
- Learn about Emanueli Miele's generational heritage.
- See Emanueli Miele not only as a honey producer, but as an expert in sustainable food gardening & creative food consumption
- Learn about Emanueli Miele future business ideas to gauge interest from potential customers. 
Challenges
- Adapting to the changing priorities and business goals of a small business that has been established for years but seeks to expand its service offerings to a completely different customer base.
- Working with a small team with a little online presence and inconsistent branding.
- Help facilitate alignment between stakeholders to drive prioritization and planning.
- Help stakeholders articulate their vision of their business and concisely portray this on the business website. 
Process
Phase 1
- Stakeholder interviews
- Value mapping 
- Information architecture
- Low fidelity mockups
- Usability Testing
- Branding
- High fidelity mockups (MVP)
- Future state roadmap

Stakeholder Interviews - Affinity diagramming of stakeholder interviews to help articulate what business priorities we should focus on including the website's MVP.

Information Architecture V1  - Mapped out a V1 of the website's information architecture to visualize the effort needed to build the vision of the services and events the company would offer in the next 3 years.

Information Architecture V2  - After a round of stakeholder feedback, we prioritized key areas that the business wanted to touch on with the MVP of the website taking into account the resources needed to execute some of the highlighted product and service capabilities.

Emanueli Miele website V1 - Low-fidelity wireframes were designed and tested.

Emanueli Miele Branding
Evoking quality whilst preserving a brands' humble roots.
Brand attributes:
- Approachable
- Welcoming
- Quality
- Healthy
- Knowledgable
- Responsible
- Transparent
- Natural
- Open

Moodboard - Examples of color palette, typography and look and feel that align to what the Emanueli Brand seeks to evoke.

Final Style Tile - Warm tones matched the color palette of the natural and architectural scenery surrounding Emanueli Miele's multiple apiary locations. Low scale gardening, food, and nature is a key component of the brands' identity, which is why earthy tones are omnipresent throughout the brands look and feel.

High Fidelity Mockup - Final

Next steps
Emanueli is an established brand that is trying to open itself a path towards growth by pursuing a different market. This comes with a particular cost in that the goals the Emanueli brand are trying to reach can only be met by a larger team with a similar mindset, values, and skills. 
I proposed a phased plan to design and build the website in a way that adapts to the business' growing needs and goals.  

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