Windy City Sweets’ famous in-store energy now lives online, creating a joyful, crave-worthy experience that delights customers one click at a time.
Mystery Shopping, Survey & Feedback
For decades, Windy City Sweets has been more than a candy shop. It’s a Chicago institution where families, friends, and sugar lovers walk in wide-eyed, surrounded by color, nostalgia, and temptation at every turn.
But online? That magic melted away.
Their old website couldn’t capture the wonder of walking through their aisles. Navigation was clunky, the visuals lacked sparkle, and with more than a thousand products, customers didn’t know where to begin.
We set out to bring that same sensory excitement: the joy, the surprise, that cheeky instant smile to their online store.
Translating the feeling of wandering through a real candy shop into a digital experience isn’t easy.
Windy City Sweets had over 1,200 unique treats - from handmade chocolates to seasonal gift baskets, and each one needed to feel special. But the old website hid the magic behind slow loading times, scattered categories, and limited discovery tools.
Our challenge was simple in theory and complex in execution: Make the online shop feel just like the real one, colorful, curious, and impossible to leave without something sweet.
We began with one question: How do people actually shop for joy?
By studying how customers explored in-store, we designed a digital experience that felt equally sensory and spontaneous.
The result was a platform that looked beautiful, worked flawlessly, and made people smile while shopping.
Every layer of technology worked together to keep the sweetness flowing.
Windy City Sweets’ online shop now captures the feeling of walking through the store itself - a colorful world where every scroll feels like a step deeper into wonder.
Magento served as the backbone, robust, flexible, and perfect for managing a large, ever-changing catalog of confections with ease and scalability.
This duo powered the website’s heartbeat, ensuring every product, order, and update moved quickly and cleanly behind the scenes.
Redis gave the site its snap, keeping pages fast and responsive even during busy holiday sugar rushes.
SearchSpring made discovery feel magical. Customers could find what they craved in seconds, whether they searched “dark chocolate,” “gummy bears,” or “birthday gifts.”
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Windy City Sweets’ famous in-store energy now lives online, creating a joyful, crave-worthy experience that delights customers one click at a time.
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