01 — Snapshot
Talitha (formerly The WestBean Coffee Roasters) is a San Diego coffee brand with three cafés, a roastery, and a mission to end human trafficking. The name means 'little girl, arise.' When I came in, they were spending like a national ecommerce brand on a budget that couldn't carry it. My job: lead the UX and social media design strategy that pulled all that digital energy back home to San Diego, working from the SEO and marketing team data that shaped every decision.
02 — Goals & Challenges
Talitha was moving from 'The WestBean' to a new identity without losing the regulars, while running on a local budget that didn't match the national ambitions of the previous strategy. The website reflected the confusion: it looked like a DTC ecommerce store and had completely forgotten that Talitha had three physical cafés in San Diego.
03 — Research & Analysis
I treated this like a design problem with three data sources to triangulate against. The customer database held the buying behavior. The SEO team held the local search intent. The marketing team held channel performance and what was actually compounding versus burning. None of them on their own showed the whole picture. Together they did.
Across 265,705 customers and 757,223 transactions in 8+ years of history, one number reframed everything: 72.4% of customers had visited only once. The whole business was running on a thin repeat base, not a wide loyal one. The lever wasn't more reach. It was depth.
The SEO team's keyword data filled in the second layer. Branded search for 'Talitha coffee' was climbing in San Diego, and 'coffee near me' queries inside the city were pulling traffic that the site couldn't catch. There were no neighborhood pages, no hours, no menus to surface in local results. People were searching with local intent and landing on a national checkout flow.
Marketing closed the loop. The national ad spend was pulling traffic that didn't convert and didn't return. Local social engagement, by contrast, was sticky: people who followed the cafés on Instagram came back. The math was obvious in hindsight. Stop chasing the country. Go deep on San Diego.
04 — Strategy
The bet, agreed across UX, SEO, and marketing: stop chasing the country, go deep on San Diego. A dollar spent building local gravity compounds. The same dollar scattered nationally just evaporates. The strategy flipped the site's hierarchy in one move: cafés first, ecommerce second, and social as a primary surface instead of an afterthought.
A note on attribution: there's a +571% DTC ecommerce lift floating around from this period. That's a real number, but it was driven by a separate national influencer program, not by the redesign. Where I can point to actual design impact: the café-first rebuild (+128% traffic, +64% branded search) and the in-store order value lift (+33% across all three locations).
The homepage became the load-bearing decision. The first scroll had to deliver the cafés, the mission, and the neighborhood story before anything tried to sell a bag of coffee. Below the fold, the shop is still there for the national audience. Above it, San Diego comes first.
Working with Paul, our in-house editor, I shaped a short video clip designed to capture Talitha's brand personality. It anchors the homepage hero, setting the tone before anyone scrolls past it.
05 — UX/UI Design
With the homepage leading visitors into the neighborhood, the next layer had to deliver on that promise. The old site had no real café presence: a single locations page with addresses and not much else. I rebuilt each neighborhood as its own destination, one for Bankers Hill, one for Clairemont, one for Liberty Station, with real menus, real hours, real maps, and community photography. People looking for coffee near them found a place, not a directory.
The shop still had to sell coffee nationally, so I cleaned that up without losing ground on conversion. Sticky sidebar navigation so you never lose your place between collections. Quick-add on the product cards so you can build a cart without leaving the page. Clear roast tags and certification icons to speed up decisions. And a calm, dismissible mission banner to replace the old all-caps marquee.
Beyond the main redesign, I also jump in to support the email marketing team on some of their campaign designs. Mostly seasonal launches and product drops, keeping the site, social, and inbox landing on the same beat.
06 — Social Media Design
Social got the same energy as the site. The feed, the packaging, the seasonal stuff (Christmas drops, holiday limited releases, the fun launches) all designed as one system instead of one-off posts. A handful of those pieces ended up doing double duty in digital PR too, picked up by press and partner placements. To keep up with the volume, we leaned on AI for first drafts, mockups, and quick variants, then I'd push the ones that mattered into final design. It cut hours off every campaign and let us ship more without the work feeling cranked out.
Visit Talitha directly to see the work in the wild, or check out the full publication on Behance for more design context.
Visit Talitha talithacoffee.comFull publication view on BehanceBuilding the local digital presence Talitha deserved was one of the most rewarding projects I've worked on. When a brand starts resonating with its community, you feel it in the numbers, and in the neighborhood.
The redesign moved the metrics, but what stuck with me was that Talitha finally felt like the San Diego brand it always was.
Thank you for reading!
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