When Michael Camphausen approached me and asked whether I could help him with his website I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Michael has a plant nursery, what he calls ‘the smallest nursery in northern Germany’ and focuses on rare plants, such as snowdrops, biarum, erythronium and more. He already had a website but it was outdated and not functioning well. So, we sat down and talked about what needed to be done. I thought it was going to be a quick and easy fix, but it became clear rather quickly that there was much more that needed to be done. It wasn’t going to be enough to come up with a new design and ‘revamp’ the old site a bit.

What was going to be a short project turned into a 9-month project. Starting off with an informational website that gave simple lists of the plants he was selling, we took a huge step to get to michaelcamphausen.de 2.0.

The new site now includes a web shop with photographs, descriptions and all the necessary sales information for each plant. Fans and customers can now easily browse through the hundreds of plants he is selling, and also have the option to buy right away instead of ordering through email. Something that has been around in other areas of sale, such as clothing, household items and whatever else, is still not common when it comes to those small companies. Plant lovers must be very patient people as most of the sites with the really cool plants, the rare ones, are not anywhere close to offering a comfortable shopping experience. It feels much more like going on a hunt for that one special snowdrop. If you are lucky the plantsman will respond to your inquiry via email within a week or… as is often the case, you might just be too late.

On Michael’s site we now not only have an enriched shopping experience that is informational and fast at the same time, we have also upgraded his own work flow to where large parts of the business side are taken care of by the systems that were put in place.

This project didn’t just present itself as a design issue. It turned out to be much more than that. It required getting to know the customers, people that are very different from customers that you would encounter when working in a clothing store or marketing for an orchestra. Instead of just selling things I had to make sure that the message wasn’t left behind. It is all about the story, about the feeling that is created. Michael loves what he does and this love can be felt in his writings and the photographs he takes of his plants. It is much more than a job to him, actually it is his destiny. Therefore, my job was to gather all that and bring it together into one website. With that came several smaller projects, marketing-relevant decisions were taken to adapt the processes at the nursery to what his customers and fans wanted to see, and all that developed into an ongoing project.

I am still working on developing the site, with Michael and for him. In the making are video and photography projects, direct marketing with his customers and fans, press relations and much more.

[michaelcamphausen.com]