Devastated by the impact the COVID-19 pandemic had on local restaurants, cafes, shops, and services, Emily and John set out on a pursuit to help these businesses survive. Leveraging their expertise in marketing and advertising, along with love of building brands, Emily and John created the social movement that is the Neighbourgood. Started as a digital gift card marketplace, the goal was to provide these brick-and-mortar shops an interim solution while they scramble to get their to businesses online.

After implementing direct outreach and social media platforms (Instagram and Facebook) to distribute the message of their mission, the initiative quickly gained traction. As merchants began signing up, Emily and John sourced Early Riser Studio to create the unique website functionality needed to fulfill their vision for the Neighbourgood. They needed to extend the capabilities of Shopify to service a 3rd party vendor model, selling gift cards on behalf of each business.

We partnered with GiftUp, a small startup in the UK, which allowed merchants to set up their own bank accounts, gift card nominations, and personalized branding. The solution involved generating a custom script for each merchant, and then embedding it as an iframe on the merchant's respective product page. We replaced the Shopify checkout with the merchant’s GiftUp checkout, and included relevant business information on each page; such as images, stories, maps and social media links. For merchants whose websites were already set up to sell gift cards, we created CTA’s which linked customers directly to their website. As the Neighbourgood evolved and expanded their offering and team, we built out subsequent page layouts (including Homepage, How It Works, Join, About) to reflect the bold and colourful brand. We used dynamic sections, sharable snippets, and schemas to allow Emily and John to make changes to the site as they continued to grow their mission to do good.