Absolute Aromas 3.0
The rebuild, so far
A look at the problem we are solving, what we have built, and where it goes next: the new website, the database that feeds it, and Abbie, the assistant who sits on top.
A look at the problem we are solving, what we have built, and where it goes next: the new website, the database that feeds it, and Abbie, the assistant who sits on top.
Here is where the project stands today. The website has been proved page by page as a working prototype, the database now holds the whole range in one place, and Abbie has gone from an idea to something you can talk to. This is a living log, so expect it to keep changing as the work moves. Have a look around, and follow the links through to the live tools.
An honest look at what is not working today. None of this is a disaster. It is the ordinary friction of a business that has grown faster than its website, and it is what the rebuild is setting out to fix.
We sell close to 600 SKUs, but the current site makes it hard to land on the one you want. Search for ‘sleep’ and nothing comes back, even though we have a whole Good Night range. Search for ‘lavender’ and more than 130 essential oils appear with no real way to narrow them down. The range is there. Getting a customer to it, quickly and without effort, is the heart of the problem.
Average order value has fallen by roughly half, from the £40 to £45 range down to around £22. Plenty sits behind that, but a site that is hard to shop is part of the picture.
The current site runs on a rigid WooCommerce template. Even sensible improvements to the experience are difficult or impossible to make, so good ideas stall.
The current site is looked after by a team in another time zone, so even small marketing changes can take days. The rebuild is being done in-house, alongside Harriet and Amy, so changes can happen the same day.
We already gather SEO, Google Ads and GEO data, but it sits in separate places and rarely feeds back into a decision. There is insight there we are not yet using.
Everything we know about our products has lived in nested Google Drive folders. That is hard for a person to search, and almost impossible for software or AI to work with.
We are moving off WooCommerce and building a completely custom Shopify theme, not another template. That is the point: a custom build gives us room to shape the experience around the customer, and lets us move quickly with AI-assisted coding rather than waiting on a third party.
We are proving the look and the flow first, as working prototype pages, because once it becomes a live Shopify theme every change gets harder. Signing the design off early is what keeps the build fast. The preview is live now and the structure and the way you move through it feel right. The images on it are AI-generated stand-ins for layout only, so the most useful thing the marketing team can do now is supply real photography and leave feedback using the button on every page.
Google Ads, SEO and GEO all hang off the new site, so they are planned in from the start rather than bolted on later.
Behind the website sits a single database that holds everything we know about every Absolute Aromas product. The website reads from it, and in time so will Amazon, the trade catalogue, the finder, and the move to Cin7. Get a product right once, in one place, and it stays right everywhere.
It is filled and live. The whole current range is in, with sizes, barcodes and prices, and thousands of product images have been pulled across from Google Drive and tidied into one library. Most of the website copy has been gathered in too, ready to be checked over.
The team works with all of this through linndontwork, a tool we built in-house to replace Linnworks. That takes a £300-plus monthly subscription off the books, with Cin7 picking up the operational side Linnworks used to handle. It does a few things a spreadsheet never could.
Questions like ‘what essential oil three-packs do we have?’ are answered straight away.
It finds products missing imagery and writes the image prompts itself, from preset rules.
Those prompts run through OpenAI to create product images at scale.
Update many products in a single action, rather than one at a time.
Largely built already. It is now getting its final checks and a tidy-up to match where the project has reached.
The name is a small dig at Linnworks. It lives at linndoesntwork.pages.dev.
Abbie is an aromatherapy assistant built into the website. A visitor can tell her how they are feeling, name a scent they already love, or simply ask for help choosing, and she talks them through the range like a knowledgeable member of the team who happens to always be on hand. She is the answer to the findability problem above.
She is not making things up. Abbie reads the very same product database as everything else, so she only ever suggests real products that we actually stock, with their real prices. Her answers come from Claude, and the key that powers her is kept safely on the server, never in the page itself.
Most importantly, she keeps to the Absolute Aromas rules. She never says an oil can cure or treat anything, she hedges her wording gently, she flags photosensitivity on citrus oils, she points anyone pregnant or asking about a child towards the right professional, and she names her sources. The brand voice and the safety guidance are built into her from the very first word.
Built and ready to demo. This is the full walkthrough; more focused clips will follow.
From here, the marketing team feeds in real photography and feedback so we can lock the design, the prototype pages get turned into the live Shopify theme, the product details get filled in so the finder and Abbie can do more, and linndontwork gets its final checks. Google Ads, SEO and GEO follow close behind, built on the same foundation.
This is a six to eight week effort, and the plan will evolve as we learn. This page is the shared log: it will be kept current so the whole team can see where things stand.