Big Sky Brands

I’ve never been a big candy guy. Never had much of a sweet tooth (I left slices of birthday cake unfinished as a kid, more of a savory dude).

But when Big Sky’s marketing team came to me for help with design and development (WordPress, Shopify), things started to shift in a sweeter direction.

How it started

In early 2025, neighbor and marketing whiz Daniel Snitman from typ marketing let me know that his client Big Sky was in need of a WordPress expert to help them manage their existing site and start laying the groundwork for a Shopify transition.

As a seasoned WP guy, I was happy to take control, managing their site for about a year and helping with various maintenance tasks: squashing bugs, building custom WooCommerce wholesale routes, customizing promotions pages, keeping the lights on.

But the real fun was around the corner: a full site redesign and migration to Shopify, which would streamline Big Sky’s international purchasing flows and clear out some of the plugin bloat of WooCommerce (sorry Woo, but them’s the breaks).

Moving to Shopify

As Spring 2026 arrived, Dan and Big Sky were ready to start redesigning their legacy site and get things cooking on Shopify.

I’d worked on a few Shopify sites in my day (and I was pretty familiar with the Liquid templating language it uses, as I referenced it when designing my own development environment), but I had never built a store from the ground up.

Lucky for me, I was a pretty eager Claude Code adopter and was confident that I could combine my frontend skills with my newfound love for the VSCode terminal to get the job done.

I was right, and I give this project full credit on taking my AI-paired development workflows to the next level. But before diving into that, we had to figure out how to sell to a relatively underserved market.

Designing for B2C

The majority of Big Sky’s business comes from its wholesale B2B offerings. Large companies buy their mints/candies in bulk, and either white-label them or sell them outright. Big Sky isn’t a household name yet (like, say, Altoids), and our task was to create a website that showed off the value of their colorful product line to people who might just want to pick up a case for themselves or their kiddos.

Nerdy development aside, this is where I shine. I’m a UX designer at heart, and I was able to jump in and identify what differentiated Big Sky from the rest of the options on the market:

Their mints and candies are not just another mint and they’re freaking delicious. Dan snuck me a couple tins when we first started working together, and Steve Yacht (CEO) shipped me a whole sample box that I’m still working through. Perfect late-night coding snack instead of inhaling a box of Triscuits.
They have flavors that you wouldn’t think would be candy flavors - dripping with nostalgia. Like, raspberry lemonade, cotton candy, ginger pear, chai...stuff that you didn’t know you actually liked. That was big, and needed to be put in lights up front.
The designs of the tins were stellar: colorful and explosive. Steve is a designer and his taste shines through when you look at the product lines. We needed to see those.

The current site did its job, but I knew that the new design needed to capitalize on the novelty and (dare I say) pop that the actual physical products have.

Design and dev beginnings

Dan handled the first wave of designs and I was tasked with building them out into a bespoke theme. I cracked my knuckles, forked the Shopify Dawn theme, connected to the store with the Shopify CLI, and got to work.

The first draft of the website for Big Sky.

The first design pass was a simple one: an e-commerce-looking template with a rotating carousel up top showing off some of the newest flavors.

I built it out as I was instructed, but as a UX-head, I’m not a huge carousel fan. This isn’t news to other UX-minded folks, but carousels suffer from sequential ordering problems that make them into usability and accessibility nightmares (and users tend not to touch them, scrolling past instead).

This was a problem, because there were 14 varieties of Big Sky mints that we wanted to show off, and users probably only got a glimpse of less than half of them before getting down to other parts of the site.

We played with carousel navigation (dots, etc) and added some coloring to the backgrounds, but something was missing.

Insight One: Product as Navigation

While I wasn't a huge fan of the carousel in general, I understood that it was an important browsing tool: much like how you might browse through movies on Netflix during a chill sesh.

So I tapped a personal product design principle that I keep in my personal toolbox: showing the (damn) product and emulating the real world.

I thought: What if we ditched the dots and showed the tins themselves as the navigation? That's how they’d look in a real store.

Boom. That worked great. I was able to leverage Dave DeSandro’s lovely Flickity carousel library for smooth autoplay, draggability on all devices, and a 1:1 relationship between the nicely-designed tins and the underlying banner.

But then we had another issue: something I call the Welcome Mat.

Insight Two: Mining the Brand

The client (Steve) flagged this early: we had our nifty carousel sitting up top on the homepage, but the site didn’t feel like other sites that introduced themselves with a standard hero. The interactive product carousel was great, but it felt like entering a conversation in the middle.. Big Sky isn’t a household name, and needed to be introduced to new visitors without immediately plunging them in to a purchasing flow.

We kicked around some more conventional ideas (a staged background image, ‘welcome to our site’ vibes), but again, something felt off.

This is where I took the wheel. I had talked with Steve about the clouds on his well-designed tins (if you’ve got a sharp eye, you might have noticed the cloud SVGs in the carousels above).

A photo of Big Sky's blue raspberry mints tin.

This got me thinking: instead of a homely background image, what if we actually explored the brand name itself (with its ‘cloud/sky’ aesthetic) to inform how we introduce ourselves to new visitors?

What if we just...used the sky as a surface?

I started exploring and the new hero design pretty much made itself:

Lots of fun stuff here: