MilkMade Ice Cream is a craft ice cream company based in New York City, started not as a business but as a way for Diana Hardeman, the founder, to get adventurously-flavored, all natural ice cream. Membership in MilkMade offers locally-sourced, all natural ingredients in exotic ice creams (flavors include Sugar on Snow, Maple Molasses Bourbon, and PBnJupiter), hand-delivered two pints at a time (one of each flavor of the month) to your door. MilkMade came to New Media Campaigns to help them scale their business by building a custom online registration and payment portal along with their marketing website.
Even though her membership is growing and her company along with it, Diana's ice cream is still a premium, niche product, and a website for her company should reflect that. New Media Campaigns therefore set out to design and implement a website that was simple, straightforward, and that showcased all that amazing looking ice cream. We also radically improved the backend, streamlining the membership and payment processes and making it easy for Diana and her staff to keep track of its members' information and payments.
When MilkMade approached New Media Campaigns about developing a new website, when people signed up for membership, the information was dumped into a Google spreadsheet and Diana would have to manually track and charge members. To improve and automate this system, we built a membership and payment process leveraging an API from Braintree, which we then customized to meet MilkMade's needs. Now, the signup process is streamlined and simple, with automated payment processing and member's information automatically added to and stored in a master database. Additionally, member signup is split into multiple screens to encourage visitors to keep giving information and make their way through the process.
A key to marketing a niche product like premium ice cream is to develop a brand and to create value. Diana builds value into her product by using high quality, all natural ingredients to create unique flavors, by hand packing the small batches of ice cream, and by hand-delivering the ice cream to members. MilkMade's website had to reflect the company's ethos, and we designed it to have an appropriate, high-quality boutique feel. Layout is simple, informative, and attractive. Photographs on each page showcase various flavors of MilkMade's ice cream, and the simple layout has four tabs that show at the top of every page and encourage visitors to learn about the company, its products, and membership.
Once again, we developed the site using HiFi, our in-house content management system. HiFi was a perfect choice because of its high performance and ability to be tailored to fill a variety of different needs. The implementation of the signup process and its custom Braintree API in the site's development are great examples of HiFi's flexibility, as well as the integrated social media buttons. As usual, the site performance is excellent, with pages and graphics loading almost instantly.
We think the new site looks great, and showcases the amazing products MilkMade is creating. Our only regret is that MilkMade is only available in the New York Metropolitan area, but we can always hope that our website design helps them grow and spread their business. We were fortunate enough to have a couple of pints hand-delivered to us right before Thanksgiving--don't expect any to be left by the time you read this!