Caras Nursery
services
Branding, Web
technologies
Svelte, Supabase
location
Orchard Homes, Montana
sector
Landscaping
duration
1 week
year
2025
Project Description
In 2025, our design agency partnered with Caras Nursery, a beloved Montana-based plant nursery specializing in premium plants, organic soils, and expert horticultural guidance. As a cornerstone of their local gardening community for over 15 years, Caras needed a website that would visually showcase their lush inventory, communicate their sustainable growing practices, and establish their authority as Montana’s go-to plant specialists. Their existing online presence didn’t reflect the care and expertise that made their physical nursery so exceptional.
Our mission was to create a digital experience that felt as vibrant and welcoming as walking into their greenhouse. We strategically highlighted their seasonal plant collections through immersive photography, crafted educational resources on soil health and plant care, and developed a clean e-commerce system for their gardening products. The result? A living, breathing website that grows their business by mirroring the same nurturing approach they give every plant—proving that great design, like great gardening, starts with understanding roots and blossoms into something extraordinary.
Web Design
We immersed ourselves in Caras Nursery’s verdant world—studying their plant varieties, soil blends, and customer interactions to craft a visual story rooted in growth. Drawing direct inspiration from their greenhouse’s lush greenery, we built a living color palette: deep evergreen for headings, soft sage for backgrounds, and warm terracotta for CTAs that “bloom” on hover. The hero section featured a looping video of hands planting seedlings—connecting human care to natural growth within seconds of landing on the page. Every design element echoed organic shapes, from leaf-patterned section dividers to custom soil texture overlays that made the digital experience feel tactile.,
The UX cultivated confidence like a well-tended garden. Using Figma, we prototyped a responsive layout that accommodated both mobile shoppers checking inventory and desktop users browsing planting guides. Key features included: plant care tooltips that “germinated” on hover, a seasonal availability filter styled like seed packets, and a soil calculator with playful dirt animations. We prioritized accessibility with high-contrast text (17px minimum for older gardeners) and fast-loading compressed images of plants. The result was a website that didn’t just showcase products—it made visitors feel the warmth of Caras’ expertise, proving that digital design can be as life-giving as the plants they sell.]
Web Development
We brought Caras Nursery’s vibrant designs to life using SvelteKit’s lightning-fast architecture, ensuring seamless browsing even for image-heavy plant catalogs. Tailwind CSS enabled pixel-perfect responsive layouts that adapted from mobile shoppers to desktop researchers, with utility classes that made future updates effortless. Prismic CMS became the root system of their digital presence—empowering staff to update seasonal plant arrivals, soil blend specifications, and educational blog posts without touching code. Our custom-built media module leveraged cutting-edge image/video enhancers to automatically optimize lush greenhouse photography into fast-loading WebP/AVIF formats, while lazy-loading preserved initial page speed.,
Every technical decision supported growth—literally and digitally. We engineered Svelte components like modular "Plant Cards" that could scale for future inventory expansions. A smart caching strategy kept CMS content fresh while achieving 0.3s load times, critical for capturing impulse buyers browsing perennials. The video enhancer transformed 4K greenhouse tours into buffer-free background loops by serving tailored versions by device (HD for desktop, 480p for mobile). The result? A website that grows with Caras—where staff can swap out promo banners as easily as they repot plants, and where visitors experience instant access to botanical beauty without compromising quality.
Graphic Design
We cultivated an organic yet sophisticated aesthetic using a natural color ecosystem - crisp white backgrounds as the "canvas", deep evergreen Playfair Display headings (700-weight) evoking robust plant life, and warm stone-gray body text for effortless readability. The high-contrast pairing of Playfair's editorial elegance with minimalist sans-serif supporting text created a visual hierarchy that felt both authoritative and nurturing - mirroring Caras Nursery's expertise and approachability. Every image was tactically composed to tell their story: macro shots of dewdrops on leaves for authenticity, smiling staff holding seedlings for human connection, and seasonal color palettes that shifted subtly with CMS-controlled banners.,
We animated the garden's vitality through intentional motion design - soil texture patterns that "sprouted" as users scrolled, interactive plant cards that "bloomed" on hover with CSS-filtered brightness shifts, and a custom loading animation of a growing sapling. These performance-optimized animations (under 2ms GPU load) served as functional guides: drawing attention to seasonal promotions, demonstrating planting techniques in tutorial tooltips, and making the extensive plant database feel alive. The result was a visual language that didn't just represent gardening - it celebrated its rhythms and rewards, positioning Caras as both educators and cultivators of beauty.
Final Product
The completed website blossomed beyond Caras Nursery’s vision—transforming their digital presence into a vibrant showcase of their horticultural expertise. We delivered all core requirements: an immersive plant catalog with seasonal filtering, educational soil guides, and seamless contact forms, all rooted in a design that made visitors feel the nursery’s passion for greenery. As our gift, we integrated Google Analytics, Search Console, and domain management at no extra cost—tools that would help their digital garden flourish.,
The response was overwhelmingly positive. Caras’ team reported a 40% increase in website inquiries within the first month, while our social followers on LinkedIn, Reddit (r/webdesign), and Facebook praised the organic aesthetic and intuitive plant-finding UX. Beyond launch, we provided detailed analytics training and a custom maintenance guide—empowering them to track growth opportunities. This project has become a flagship in our portfolio, proving that even earth-centered businesses can have cutting-edge digital experiences. We’re already discussing phase two: an AR plant preview feature for their mobile users.
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