Orto

Orto is a social enterprise in Chiasso, on Switzerland's southern border. It grows fruits and vegetables within and sells that produce to the local community. The work matters twice over: it feeds the town with food that hasn't travelled and it gives people who have been pushed to the margins of working life a real job to come back to. The dignity comes from the work itself, not from being helped.

All of that was sitting behind a single-page website that couldn't possibly communicate the story and the value that Orto has at its core. Orto needed a site that did more: an honest account of what they do and a genuine shop running underneath it, without the cost, weight and constant upkeep of off-the-shelf solutions.

• Designed and built an entirely new site with custom theme to replace the one-page template they had outgrown. The design is ours, made to look like Orto and nowhere else.
• Hand-built the whole shop ourselves instead of reaching for WooCommerce or Shopify. Every fruit and vegetable is its own piece of content, with its season, its story and its price kept in one place the team controls.
• Set their pick-up locations up as part of the shop, so a customer chooses where to collect and the site takes care of the rest.
• Added recipes alongside the produce, so the site can sell you the vegetable and tell you what to cook with it.
• Built a private members area where customers can look back over their past orders and payments in one place.
• Wired the shop into the systems Orto already runs on, their ERP and CRM, so a sale on the site becomes an order, a customer and a marketing contact with no one re-typing anything. The same connection sends customers their reminders and confirmations by SMS, automatically.
• Built partner integrations so Orto can work with outside brands, with discounts and coupons tailored to each partnership.

Orto now has a website that does two jobs at once, just as the organisation does. It tells the story of the place and the people plainly and it runs as a real shop behind that story, with produce, pick-ups, members and partners all handled in one system. Because we built it by hand and kept it light, there is no monthly platform fee quietly climbing, no plugin sprawl to patch, and nothing to maintain that nobody asked for. It is fast, secure, and entirely theirs.

We wanted the technology to disappear so the work could show. A shop light enough that Orto never has to think about it, and a story worth stopping for.