The challenge
Vital Vial is an Australian company making liquid extracts from five functional mushrooms — Lion's Mane, Cordyceps, Chaga, Reishi and Maitake — and it came to launch before it had anything to sell: the first release is scheduled for October 2026. That changes what a store is for. With no checkout to optimise, the site's job is to earn an email address from someone who has never heard of the brand, in a category crowded with big promises. The brand's position is the opposite of that: whole raw fruiting bodies, a documented extraction process, and every batch independently tested against a release specification. The difficulty is that extraction science is exactly the kind of content visitors skip, and the easy way to make a wellness brand exciting is the claim-led copy this brand refuses to write. The store had to make the method itself interesting enough to sign up for.
What we did
- Organised the brand story as a three-stage framework — Break, Capture, Verify — and carried it through the homepage, a dedicated process page with a side-by-side diagram of conventional extraction against theirs, and the standards page, so the method reads as one argument rather than scattered claims.
- Built a Standards page around 'Verified, not claimed': the release specification, accredited testing, traceability and an explicit section on what the brand will not claim, which is the credibility a pre-launch wellness brand has to establish before it asks for anything.
- Designed the store for a launch, not a sale. Each of the five extracts has its own product page marked Coming October, the purchase button becomes Join the launch list, collection cards say Notify me, and a First releases collection presents the range.
- Made email capture the conversion, in two places at two levels of commitment — a timed launch popup asking only for a first name and email, and a Be first to know band further down the page.
- Gave the brand's people a page of their own — the founding team, with their scientific background — alongside an About page that explains why biotechnologists started it.
- Built a Journal and a categorised FAQ with FAQ structured data, plus Organization structured data declaring the registered business, ABN and address, so search engines and AI assistants can identify the company behind the product.
- Added discovery tooling ahead of the catalogue it will need: predictive search with suggested questions, a mega menu across Extracts, The Science, Our Standard, Company and Journal, a saved-items wishlist and a cart drawer.
- Shipped it as a bespoke theme in a forest, cream and gold palette with Playfair Display headings and editorial still-life photography, so the store looks like the premium product it is launching.
The results
How we would approach yours
Every engagement starts the same way: a free audit of the store as it stands today — speed, technical SEO, checkout friction and paid efficiency — followed by a prioritised roadmap that puts effort against expected impact. You keep the findings whether or not we go further.
From there the work runs in weekly sprints against a live staging link, on fixed scope, with design, development and marketing in one team. That last part is why a conversion problem gets diagnosed once here rather than being passed between two agencies who each think it belongs to the other.