The Northumberland Cheese Company Shopify store homepage, with its Bamburgh cheese on a board

Northumberland Cheese Company: bringing the cheese shop and Cheese Box Club together on Shopify

Northumberland, delivering UK-wideEcommerceSubscriptionsSite migration

The project

Two brands, one store, ready for Christmas

Northumberland Cheese Company is an award-winning artisan cheesemaker on the Blagdon Estate, and the business behind the Cheese Box Club subscription. The two brands ran on separate websites on an ageing platform, so we designed and built a single Shopify store that sells both through one basket, one checkout and one customer account, then moved the customers, order history and blog across, with every old web address redirected, in time for Christmas trading.

Sector: Artisan cheese & food gifts
Brands: Cheesemaker + subscription club
Platform: Shopify

View Live Project

What was the challenge?

Two websites, one busy business

Northumberland Cheese Company sells a great deal more than cheese. Alongside its own award-winning range there are deli favourites, beer, wine and spirits, Christmas hampers, gift vouchers, ticketed events, cheese wedding cakes and the Cheese Box Club, and each comes with its own delivery, tax and fulfilment rules. The shop and the club ran as two separate websites, with separate customer accounts and separate orders.

Because so much of what customers buy is a gift, they book a specific delivery day, often weeks ahead, and the new store had to keep that. It also had to bring years of customers, orders, awards and blog posts across without losing any of them, and be live before Christmas ordering began in October.

A Northumberland Cheese Company Christmas box with its add-a-drink option, and the cheese collection with filters and award badges

How did we approach it?

One store, two brands, nothing left behind

We brought both brands into one Shopify store and let the Cheese Box Club keep its own identity inside it. Club pages switch to the club's navy and yellow palette and typefaces, while club boxes and cheese share one basket, one checkout and one account, so a customer can buy a board and a subscription in a single order.

We built the delivery date picker into the basket, carrying the chosen date through to every order, email and despatch date. We migrated all customers and order history from the old systems, ensuring there were no gaps.

ShopifyTwo brands, one checkoutRehearsed migration

What did we build?

A store that knows how the business runs

Customers choose their delivery day from an accessible calendar in the basket that understands the dairy's despatch week, UK bank holidays, Christmas closures and last guaranteed dates, or switch to click and collect from the café shop with its own collection rules. The Cheese Box Club runs rolling and prepaid gift subscriptions timed to its third-Wednesday delivery, delivery is charged fairly per parcel rather than per basket, and a basket holding alcohol asks for an over-18 confirmation that is recorded on the order.

Around that sit an Awards page built from competition results that the team edits from each product, reviews attached only where a customer reviewed that exact product, and branded customer and subscription emails. Everything the team changes day to day, from delivery holidays to Christmas notes, is editable in Shopify without a developer.

Delivery date calendarSubscription clubPer-parcel delivery rules

The basket's delivery date calendar open on December, the Nettle Cheese product page with its weight selector, and the shoppable Shop the Board photo

From the studio

The work customers never see

Every business works a little differently, so we shaped the store around how NCC already works rather than the other way round. That meant building bespoke flows and custom functionality on Shopify, from letting customers choose their delivery day to making sure that date follows each order through to the team packing it. Much of what makes a switch like this feel seamless is invisible, from carefully mapped redirects to order history carried across intact. For customers, it simply works: they sign in and find their past orders, saved addresses and Christmas delivery day exactly where they expect them.

Miles Debinski, Co-Founder & Technical Lead at Digital Otter

More about this project

What Shopify plan is required for the subscriptions and bespoke delivery functionality?

The store runs on Shopify's Grow plan, and none of its subscription or delivery features need Shopify Plus. Shopify reserves custom fields inside checkout for Plus, its enterprise plan, so instead of moving the business onto a far larger plan, we built the delivery date picker into the basket and carried the chosen date through to the order, the confirmation emails and the despatch date, which Shopify Flow sets automatically. The subscriptions run through Seal Subscriptions, and the per-parcel delivery charges and postcode rules use delivery profiles and a checkout rules app, all on the same plan.

How did you approach combining two websites?

We treated it as one business with two brands, rather than two websites to stitch together. Both brands now live in one Shopify store, with the Cheese Box Club keeping its own navy and yellow identity on its own pages, while club boxes and cheese share one basket, one checkout and one customer account. Behind the scenes, we merged the customers and order history from both sites by email address, so someone who had bought from both now has a single account with their full history, and we rebuilt the catalogue from both old sites with each product's original SKU and moved all 83 blog posts across with their original dates. Marketing consent came across only where a customer had given it, and customers now sign in with a one-time email code to find their past orders.

How did you protect the SEO authority from the old websites?

By giving every old web address a direct route to its new home. We mapped the old addresses on both domains, drawing on the old sitemaps, the old platform's own redirect table and archived copies of the sites going back to 2007, and redirected each one to the right new page, testing every redirect on launch day. Every product, collection and page also has its own search title and description, headings were audited across the site, and the store carries product, business, café, breadcrumb and blog structured data. It is the groundwork we treat as part of any Shopify migration.

How long did the project take?

The build took about six weeks. Development began in early September 2026, working from our bespoke design in Figma, and the store launched during October, in time for the client's peak festive trading. The customer and order migration was rehearsed in advance, so launch day was a planned switchover, and a final top-up the night after launch brought across the last orders placed on the old websites.

Can the team run the store themselves?

Yes. Awards, product callouts, menus, delivery rules and holidays, Christmas notes and featured blog posts are all edited in Shopify without a developer, while the design settings that keep pages consistent sit behind a single switch so the editor stays uncluttered. The team has a training guide and a phone-order guide, and we stay on after launch: we have since built a small admin app, now being rolled out, that flags any order whose delivery date has been changed by hand so its tags and despatch date can be put right in one click.

Why build the store on Shopify?

The business needed one platform to run a shop, a subscription club, click and collect, events and gift vouchers, rather than several systems stitched together. Shopify handles payments, subscriptions, automation through Shopify Flow and the team's daily admin reliably, which frees the bespoke work for the parts that make this business different. That balance is why it is the platform we recommend for most ecommerce projects of this kind.