Oleum Crete is single-estate extra virgin olive oil from the Messara Plain in southern Crete. Koroneiki olives, hand-harvested, cold-pressed below 27°C, PDO-certified, four generations of the Kidonakis family. In the UAE it was being sold from a stock Shopify template that read like a supermarket shelf, at an entry price of AED 85, while the oil itself belonged next to Bateel, Maknoon and The Deli Gate.
Today the same oil, from the same estate, sells eighteen times more per month through the new site than it did before the rebuild. That is 18x monthly sales with no paid advertising at all: every order came from search, AI assistants, WhatsApp, Instagram or people typing the address in.
| Generic Shopify template | Custom headless storefront | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly sales | 1x | 18x |
| Flagship price | AED 85 | AED 210 |
| Paid media | None | None |
| Found through search and AI assistants | No | Yes |
| Reviews on site | No | Yes, five stars |
This is the build story: what we changed, what it cost in decisions rather than money, and the numbers along the way. It is written for founders who own a good product and a website that undersells it.
The brief had one job
Take Oleum Crete from "another bottle on the shelf" to a brand that can credibly charge what the oil is worth. The accepted proposal split that into four phases: a bespoke storefront, a professional photoshoot, a price repositioning, and a performance-marketing engine once the foundation could support the traffic. Every decision below traces back to one of those four.
Why we went headless instead of buying a better theme
A premium theme would have been faster and cheaper. It would also have produced a nicer supermarket shelf. The things that justify a AED 210 bottle, a film, an origin story, proof of certification, a product page that reads like an editorial, do not fit inside a theme's blocks.
So we built the storefront as a custom headless app on Shopify Hydrogen, rendered on Shopify's Oxygen edge network. Shopify still owns the catalogue, cart, checkout and payments, so the client's operations did not change by a single click. Everything the visitor sees is ours.
That choice unlocked the pieces the brand actually needed:
- A cinematic homepage. The hero rotates through several scenes from the estate, including the pour and tasting moment, with the brand film full-bleed below it.
- The origin map. An interactive sequence that zooms from Crete to Greece to the world, drawing the estate's real export reach across 40 destinations, nearest arcs first. It became the single most praised section of the site.
- Certificates you can verify without leaving the page. PDO Messara, EU Organic, FSSC 22000 and Kosher, each opening the real document in a same-page overlay, placed directly above the product grid so proof is the last thing a visitor sees before shopping.
- Their own film, reborn. Rather than commission new footage, we re-mastered the family's legacy film from the original 4K source, graded it to the site's dark palette, and serve it adaptively: 1080p on desktop, 720p on mobile.
- Findable by search engines and by AI. Every page is server-rendered with full structured data and open to the crawlers behind ChatGPT and the other assistants, so when someone asks where to buy premium olive oil in Dubai, Oleum Crete is a brand the machines can actually read and recommend.
- Reviews where the decision happens. Real customer reviews on the product pages, collected automatically after each order and fed into search results as star ratings.
Guided selling, then a checkout in three taps
Five SKUs is enough to confuse a first-time buyer. Each bottle now carries a role, "for the table", "the connoisseur's pick", "the gift", "for the kitchen", so the right one is obvious within a second of reaching the shop.
The product page puts the buy moment above the fold and tucks tasting notes, sourcing and details into accordions, with click-to-zoom imagery colour-matched to the real bottles. From there the path to a placed order is three taps for a wallet-pay customer: add to cart, proceed to checkout, Apple Pay or Google Pay. Guest checkout is the default, the LAUNCH30 code carries through automatically, and the cart drawer shows progress toward free delivery to nudge a second bottle.
Checkout runs on a custom domain, checkout.oleumcrete.ae, with AED pricing and a restyled hosted checkout, not a generic Shopify subdomain. And instead of email forms, a WhatsApp concierge button sits on every page with the number pre-loaded, because in the UAE that is where customers actually want to talk.
Two days in Dubai, four themes, 50+ images
The photoshoot was planned as a library, not a hero image. Product studio, Dubai landmarks, food and cooking, beauty and wellness, over two days. Those images now run through the homepage, the product editorial, the closing call to action, and the launch film and social content. Shooting once for every channel is what made the launch look coherent.
The engineering numbers
Beautiful is not enough if it is slow, and premium buyers in the UAE shop on their phones. Before launch we cut the mobile hero weight by about 80%, from 209KB to 42KB, and shortened the mobile page from 18 screens to 13 without touching the desktop experience.
| Measure | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Lighthouse best practices | 92 | 100 |
| Mobile hero image weight | 209KB | 42KB |
| Mobile screens to scroll | 18 | 13 |
| Structured data | None | Organization, Product, FAQ, Breadcrumb, Article |
Technical SEO shipped with the build rather than after it: per-product titles, canonicals, Open Graph and the full set of JSON-LD types, so the shop is eligible for rich results and the reviews feed star ratings in search. The domain cutover on 29 June was zero-downtime, with instant rollback held in reserve and never needed.
Moving up the shelf
The premise of the whole project was that Oleum was priced at entry-premium levels for a product that belongs at the top of the market. With the storefront and photography in place, the range was repositioned from a single AED 85 entry point to a five-bottle ladder from AED 120 to a AED 210 flagship, priced against Ellive, The Governor and Muraglia rather than supermarket comparables.
The origin map, the harvest story and the film exist precisely to justify the move up-market. Perceived value first, price second.
The first 30 days, honestly
Launch went out with a cinematic film on Instagram and a 30% welcome offer, LAUNCH30, framed as a gift to the UAE with a hard deadline. These are the live Shopify numbers for the 30 days after launch against the 30 days before.
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Storefront sessions | 519, up 322% |
| Sales | up 44% |
| Sessions arriving direct (URL, WhatsApp, Instagram) | 85% |
| Orders using LAUNCH30 | 7 of 7 |
| Reviews collected | 5, all five stars |
The honest read: order count held at seven while sessions more than quadrupled, so conversion rate fell period over period. That is the normal shape of a launch spike, where a lot of new, curious traffic arrives before it is ready to buy. It is exactly what the conversion work, reviews, gifting, urgency and cart nudges, plus conversion tracking for paid search, is built to fix in the following months.
The result that surprised everyone: the win-back
Alongside the launch, we messaged the roughly 30 customers who had bought before the relaunch, one to one on WhatsApp, with LAUNCH30 as a thank-you. Personal messages, not a broadcast.
Six of the seven launch-month orders came from that list, and 94% of launch-month revenue came from people who already trusted the brand. The replies were the kind you cannot buy: "Ordered. Thank you." "We tried the oil. Excellent." A repeat buyer asked to be told when new stock arrives.
The lesson generalises to almost every founder we work with: before you pay for a single cold click, talk to the people who already bought. Most of the list had not even been contacted yet.
Two months on: 18x monthly sales, all organic
The launch spike settled, the reviews accumulated, search and AI assistants started sending buyers, and the WhatsApp channel kept the past customers close. Monthly sales on the new storefront are now eighteen times what the old template produced, before the first paid campaign has been switched on.
Three things did most of the work. The higher price point, which the storefront now earns rather than asks for. The buying experience, guided selling and a checkout that gets out of the way, so the visitors who arrive actually convert. And discoverability, being readable by Google and by AI assistants, which is where the new customers keep coming from.
What is running now
- Reviews. Judge.me integrated headlessly. Every buyer gets a review link after purchase, and the ratings feed structured data for star snippets in search.
- The Journal. An on-brand, SEO-ready blog wired to the client's own Shopify admin, so they publish tasting guides and the Messara story themselves. Three posts were live at handover.
- Paid search. Google Ads for high-intent terms like "buy olive oil online Dubai" and "premium EVOO UAE", at a recommended AED 1,500 to 1,850 a month in media, targeting a 3x to 4x return, with management included in the original package.
- The demand engine. A founder-led cadence of Journal posts, Reels cut from the photoshoot library, a WhatsApp catalogue and a post-purchase review and referral flow.
What this means if you own a good product on a bad website
Oleum Crete did not need a new product, a new logo or a bigger budget. It needed a storefront that told the truth about the oil, a checkout that got out of the way, a price that matched the story, a way for search engines and AI assistants to find it, and a launch that started with the customers it already had. Eighteen times the monthly sales, with the ad budget still untouched. That is the work we do, in that order.
If your site undersells what you make, book a free audit. We will look at your storefront, your funnel and your existing customers, and tell you which lever to pull first. Read more about how we build storefronts on the website design and development page, and how we grow them on the performance marketing page.
