A curly girl drinking coffee while watching outside a window

Case study ↓

Transforming Coffee
Into a Wellness Ritual

Over 80% of American adults love to consume caffeine daily in some form. Unfortunately, caffeine doesn’t always love them back: many people find caffeine impairs their sleep and causes increased heart rate and anxiety.

Rarebird wants to solve this problem through a range of enhanced coffees: their signature product is Coffee Redefined, which infused with paraxanthine (Px), a natural metabolite of caffeine. Coffee Redefined gives users all the benefits of caffeine, such as increased mental awareness and productivity, with none of the downsides.

In 2022, after testing and tweaking their product, Rarebird got in touch with Nebulab to design and launch their online store. The result is a nimble but mighty DTC experience for a brand that is sure to leave a mark.

industry

Food & Beverage

services

UX/UI Design
Engineering

platform

Shopify
Hydrogen

“Rarebird’s goal is to allow you to work and live better. We formulated an improved coffee ritual to empower people to seize the day, embrace their passions, and achieve improved wellness.”

Sam LilleyHead of Strategic Initiatives @ Rarebird
Purchase user flow
Website wireframes

A discovery process that uncovers diamonds.

Our design-driven discovery process allows us to quickly and efficiently onboard new clients such as Rarebird: the first step is a discovery questionnaire, where we get to know the brand, their goals, and their target audience.

Once we have a good understanding of the brand, we move on to interactive design. This involves user flow maps, which allow us and the client to quickly visualize and experiment with different paths users might take through the product. We then move on to producing content briefs for the individual pages and wireframes at various levels of fidelity.

Early on, we prefer words and diagrams over pixel-perfect designs—this approach allows us to iterate at an increased velocity and gives all stakeholders a chance to express their feedback in the way that feels most natural to them.

Design System foundations
Design System components

Scalable designs for a pragmatic brand.

When Rarebird reached out to us, they only had a few basic building blocks for their brand—our designers turned those foundations into a design system that would scale with Rarebird as they continued to tweak and iterate on their digital presence.

Our design systems and UI kits are extracted straight from the final high-fidelity wireframes. This minimizes the project timeline and ensures that any components we create can be applied in an actual use case.

And because we approach design and engineering holistically, Rarebird’s design system was developed from day one so that it could be easily implemented with Tailwind. This makes it easy for engineers to map design to code one-to-one, creating a consistent brand experience and faster time-to-market.

Headless technology. Seamless evolution.

Considering the brand’s early stage, we wanted to keep Rarebird’s eCommerce stack as simple as possible to minimize the go-live timeline and the cost of future changes. At the same time, we also wanted to use best-in-class technology that would give them maximum flexibility to evolve their storefront.

We chose Hydrogen, Shopify’s framework for building headless storefronts. Hydrogen allows Rarebird to access the entire ecosystem of Shopify plugins and integrations while also allowing them to customize every aspect of their storefront.

The cherry on top? Rarebird’s storefront is fully covered by automated QA tests, allowing them to iterate with unmatched speed and confidence. The result is a robust yet incredibly flexible DTC experience, which enables Rarebird to experiment continuously and find their path to success.

Product Page preview
Quiz Page preview

“Nebulab’s multi-layered process helped us deliver a storefront that we were proud of and felt authentic to our brand—all in a condensed timeframe.”

Sam LilleyHead of Strategic Initiatives @ Rarebird
Rarebird coffee bag with mug

Let’s redefine
eCommerce together.