An Experiential E-Commerce Website - Premium Tea, Spices

The Project

We are Penbrae & Co Ltd, a Cardiff-based company importing rare, handcrafted teas, spices, and chillies from Northeast India. We are looking for a talented web designer to build our e-commerce website from scratch.

This is not a standard product catalogue. The website needs to tell the story of each product and the artisan producers who make them — through text, photography, short video, and audio — while making it completely easy to browse and buy on a phone.

What you’ll build:

• A fully functional WordPress + WooCommerce website (or equivalent — we’re open to ideas)
• Around 11 pages including three distinct product stalls, individual product pages, a maker stories section with an interactive map, a journal/blog, and a clean checkout
• Mobile-first, fast-loading, accessible, and beautifully designed
• A non-linear browsing experience — visitors should be able to move between products, makers, and stories without being funnelled through a single path

Draft site map

• Home — immersive landing, entry points to Stalls, Meet the Makers, and a featured product or story
• The Stalls → Teas / Spices / Chillies → individual Stalls will have a product catalogue (each product linked to product page)
• Product Page → Product Information (linked to its Story Page)
• Meet the Makers — interactive map → individual maker story pages (each linked to their Story Page, like a mind map)
• Story Page (of each product) — Story of the grower, pictures and videos of when, how and where it was made etc. (linked to its Product Page)
• About Penbrae — who we are, why we do this, Cardiff to Assam
• Subscribe — newsletter sign-up + optional tea/spice club
• Instagram feed woven into the website, not a standalone page

The look and feel is premium and editorial — think ancient, rare, limited edition.

This project leads to ongoing work. We expect to grow the site over time and there is a realistic path from this fixed-price build to part-time and eventually full-time work for the right person.

Essential skills — WordPress/WooCommerce, strong visual design, mobile-first dev, AI-assisted coding (we expect you to use AI, such as Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, or similar, to accelerate your work; comfort with AI-assisted coding and problem-solving is essential, not optional), e-commerce UX, performance optimisation, SEO/analytics and creative problem solving

Bonus skills — graphic design, social media, photography/video editing, illustration or map-making (the last one is a quiet signal for the Maker Map).

To apply and move forward, please include in your response:

1. Portfolio examples closest to this brief, with a short note on why you chose them
2. Tell us your preferred tech stack and roughly what you’d charge for a project of this scope.
3. Your recommended tech stack, if different from WordPress + WooCommerce
4. A fixed-price quote for the full project, broken down by phase
5. Your hourly rate for part-time ongoing work after the build is complete — we expect to grow the engagement over time and want to understand what that looks like financially from the start
6. We are open to your approach (if you prefer Elementor, we can provide access to Astra Pro). If you have a better solution — a custom theme, a headless build, a different page builder — we want to hear your thinking.