A hand-built shop for zero-kilometre produce with a social conscience
The problem
Orto is a social enterprise in Chiasso, on Switzerland’s southern border. It grows fruit and vegetables and sells them to its own community, 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 communicate the story or the value. Orto needed 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.
What we built
We designed and built an entirely new site with a custom theme. Instead of reaching for WooCommerce or Shopify we hand-built the whole shop: every fruit and vegetable is its own piece of content with its season, its story and its price, pick-up locations are part of the checkout, and recipes sit alongside the produce.
A private members area lets customers look back over past orders and payments. The shop is wired into Orto’s ERP and CRM, so a sale becomes an order, a customer and a marketing contact with nobody re-typing anything, and customers get their reminders and confirmations by SMS automatically.
A box you build yourself
The heart of the shop is the box builder. Customers assemble their own box from what is in season this week, choose where to collect it, and pay. Behind it, orders are stored as structured content the team can see, edit and export, and the integrations take care of the rest.
Because we built it by hand and kept it light, there is no monthly platform fee quietly climbing and no plugin sprawl to patch. 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.”