Alkemio Kitchen app

Chef Fergus Blair, known for his unusual fusion cuisine (and for being a good friend of mine) launched his own range of hot sauces back in late 2020. He started off by selling them in local shops and market stalls on Portobello road, but soon found he had become quite popular and couldn't keep up with the orders coming in. Then the pandemic hit, the markets closed and all the orders had to be mail delivered.

He called me one day in January 2021, hunched over a spreadsheet with his head in his hands ( I could tell because I was on speaker) and said, "Felicity, you do apps and websites, yeah?"
I didn't have time to explain what UX design was: my friend needed me!

Do you accept this mission?

With a lot of time in my hands, nothing to lose and delicious meals to gain I took on this project in the middle of my downtime. The requirements were simple:

1.

Restyle the Brand Identity

2.

Design a mobile app for orders and recipes

The Look

The style for the hot sauce's range was originally a rustic kind of vibe. It had the feel of a wholesome, homemade recipe - not a bad thing but now Fergus was looking to go into a more sleek direction. I moodboarded some concepts for him arriving onto the black and brass theme he uses today.

Before

After

The App

Designing and e-commerce app is not that hard if you use a template, but it can be quite heavy and may have a lot of dependencies to keep track of updating. Knowing this project was going to be a handover I didn't want to compromise my friend and client by having them depend on me to maintain it.

I made a design decision to create a lightweight browser based app.
The function it performs are two fold: