Melia: The Greek Way to Beauty
Our most challenging assignment, so far, in the “Digital Creativity: Apps, Games, Coding” lab was to come up with an innovative business idea. Our team, Viral Vixens (Marina Karvouni, Eirini Tsv, Elena Tsakiridou, georgia flaouna), managed to come through and we decided to create an eshop with handmade beauty products from Greece. Thus, “Melia” (melia.adandprlab.com) was born. How is that innovative, you ask? Well, keep reading to find out!
“Melia” means “ash tree” in Greek, a derivative of μέλι (meli) “honey”. This was the name of a nymph in Greek mythology, the daughter of the God Oceanus. And that is why we believe it is a perfect fit for our brand. Not only we aim to make you feel like a nymph, like a Greek Goddess, but we also provide products made of natural Greek ingredients, such as honey. “Melia” is much more than another eshop with beauty products. Our dream is to promote Greece, its mesmerizing landscapes and glorious products, as well as to make women all over the world feel beautiful, using ancient and contemporary Greek recipes and rituals.
Apart from the site’s goal to promote Greece through its products and its beautiful locations, it also enables you to actually buy these products and try them for yourself. Our e-shop consists of several products for your face, your body and your hair. All of the products are made with organic ingredients and are destined to help each woman pamper herself in the most natural way. Now women of all over the world have the chance to discover the recipes and the secrets of Greek beauty and transform themselves into a Greek goddess. In the site you can select the product of your choice, add it to your cart and purchase it. On each product’s page there is a short description about it and, in some cases, there are larger descriptions, which offer information about the ingredients and their properties. Under each product you can find tags, which lead you to similar products, in order to make your journey on melia.adandprlab.com easier!!
We ship worldwide and the packages in which we send our orders are recyclable with our logo engraved on olive wood. In your delivery, you will find small samples of Greek goods contained in the product you purchased, as a gift for you to try, together with a few words about that ingredient. We partner with companies that sell edible Greek products to do so and we refer you to their website in order to buy a full size product, like a jar of honey or a tub of Greek yogurt.
As we mentioned, our products are made out of natural Greek ingredients, such as honey, olive oil, mastic and yogurt, which are widely loved around the globe. By clicking on our ingredients page, the visitor can find information about the benefits of each ingredient. Below the description of each ingredient the customer can click the link and visit the location where each ingredient grows, in order to learn more about it. Other than that, he or she can find a link to view and buy the products that contain this ingredient.
Since one of our main goals is to promote Greece and tourism, there is a separate page in our website completely dedicated to Greece. There, you can find photos and information about Greek locations (some rather famous and some you’ve never heard before).
These locations aren’t random locations that we chose to promote. They are, actually, wisely selected. Not only are they famous for some of the raw materials (the ingredients) that they produce, but also they constitute the origin of our products.
In that page, the customer can find interesting and useful information and learn more about those places, their history, popular places to visit there and information about the raw materials and their production in their mother land. But we are not just another online encyclopedia for ingredients. You can find several videos regarding the locations and the ingredients and you can also book a hotel at the location of your choice, through our website. There is always a map for every place in order to know exactly where it is located in Greece and, of course, links to the ingredients and the products.
In order to do all of the above, we used Wordpress. We created our website from scratch and dedicated several weeks in order to perfect it. We really went with trial and error here, since neither of us had done anything like this in the past. Whenever we needed to add something to our website, we googled it and through videos and reviews, we found the best ways and plugins to use.
Other than that, on our website you can find information about our brand and our headquarters, our contact information, our social media accounts and you subscribe to our newsletter in order to be the first to know about our latest products and our sales.
The theme that we chose is “Avant”, because we thought it is simple and elegant and it enables our users to easily navigate on our website and focus on the products without many distractions. We used many plugins, such as “Jetpack”, “Carousel Slider”, “Newsletter”, “Woo Commerce”, “WooCommerce PayPal Express Checkout Gateway”, “WP live chat” and “Yoast SEO”.
All in all, we are very pleased about the result and we believe that our hours of hard work really paid off. We are kind of sad that we have to leave our project for now, but we might try to make it work again in the future!
Many thanks to Dr. Stavros Kaperonis for giving us the opportunity to create something we love so much!
