Shopify redesign & brand

Malawian Coffee

A coffee shop that shows you where the beans and the profits go.

Client
Social enterprise coffee company
Year
2026
What we did
Shopify redesign, Brand on the web, Story & content, Search visibility, Email sign-ups
Live
Launching soon

Before

The Malawian Coffee Company was started in 2018 by a founder born in northern Malawi, to fix vague supply chains and ethical claims nobody can check. It buys specialty coffee straight from smallholder farmers near Mzuzu, has it roasted in the UK, and gives 100% of its profits back to Malawi. In person, at its market stalls, the brand is loud and proud. Online, the shop was Shopify’s free theme straight out of the box: “Welcome to our store”, a menu called “Catalog”, black and white, and a cookie banner over the coffee. The reason the company exists, the farmers and the cause, wasn’t on the site at all.

After

The shop now feels like the stall. Bold condensed capitals, colours taken from the bags, and a band cut from the chitenje cloth on the stall table. Every coffee page shows where it’s grown, how it tastes and how to brew it, with a choice of size, grind and a monthly subscription. Every bag says where its profit goes, and links to the story: what it means for a farmer to sell to them, and where the money has gone since 2018. There’s also a wholesale page with an enquiry form, market dates that update themselves, and links from the old site that still land in the right place.

The new homepage: the logo, a menu with Coffee, Our story and Find us, and the headline 'Specialty coffee from northern Malawi' over a video of green coffee beans in cupped hands.The old Malawian Coffee homepage: a 'Welcome to our store' bar, a plain black-and-white menu and the headline 'Malawian Coffee Company, Single Origin. Full Of Flavour.'
Drag to compare the homepage before and after.
The Our story page: '100% of our profits go back to Malawi' in large type, with a timeline of where the money has gone, from a washing station in 2018 to school fees.
Our story: where the profits have gone, year by year.

How we got there

  • A concept before the build. We made a quick, standalone version of the new shop first, so the look was agreed before the store was touched. It used only what the shop’s free theme can do, so building it was a translation, not a second redesign.
  • The free theme, pushed further. It’s built on the Shopify theme the company already had, with custom sections added. No paid theme, and no licence to renew.
  • The company’s own words. The lines from their Instagram bio, “Championing the farmers”, “Paying livable wages”, “Connecting cultures”, run across the homepage. The story comes from them, not from us.
  • The shop kept trading. Everything was built on an unpublished copy of the theme, with the store backed up first and every subscriber’s order left alone.

Built with

  • Shopify
  • Horizon theme
  • Appstle Subscriptions
  • Klaviyo