Scented Garden Retreat

About Scented Garden Retreat

Scented Garden Retreat is a day spa in Chester with two sites in the city, one in the historic rows of Northgate Street and a second at Old Port Square. It offers holistic and body treatments, facials, beauty essentials and treatment packages, alongside a well stocked retail area carrying Dermalogica, Aromatherapy Associates, Scentered, Spongelle and a range of pure essential oils.

Like most treatment businesses, a meaningful share of its trade is gifted rather than bought for the buyer. Birthdays, Christmas, Mother's Day, thank yous and apologies all arrive at the same counter in the form of a gift voucher. Selling those vouchers was never the problem. Processing them was.

The Challenge

A gift voucher looks like a simple product until you count the steps behind it. Somebody has to take the payment, work out the amount, produce a voucher that looks worth giving, record the code, and get it to the buyer in time for whatever occasion prompted the purchase. Do that by hand and every sale costs a slice of somebody's day, usually at the busiest point in the calendar, and usually while that same person is meant to be looking after a client in a treatment room.

The retreat also wanted buyers to choose their own amount. Fixed denominations are easy to build and awkward to buy, because the person giving the gift has a figure in mind and it is rarely the figure on the button. Anything that made them stop and think was a sale at risk.

And the voucher itself had to look like the business. A generic receipt with a number on it undoes the impression that every other part of the retreat works hard to create.

What We Built

We built the gift voucher into the website as a proper online product rather than an enquiry. A customer chooses their own amount, pays online, and a gift voucher is generated automatically as a PDF designed specifically for Scented Garden Retreat. It lands in the buyer's inbox on its own.

That last part is the whole point. There is no queue of orders waiting for somebody to make a voucher, no manual step at the retreat, and no manual step at our end either. The system produces the document, sends it and records the sale without anybody touching it, at two in the morning on Christmas Eve just as reliably as at eleven on a Tuesday.

The voucher was designed rather than templated, so what arrives in the inbox carries the retreat's own look. The website also sets out the treatment menu across holistic and body treatments, facials, beauty essentials and packages, with the retreat locations, opening hours and the voucher terms all in the open where buyers can check them before they commit.

The Result

Gift vouchers now sell around the clock and cost the business nothing to fulfil. What used to be an interruption to the working day is a line on a report. The buyer gets their voucher immediately, which matters enormously to the substantial number of people who buy a gift on the day they need it, and the recipient gets something that looks like a present rather than a proof of purchase.

For a two site business where the same people deliver the treatments and run the admin, taking a whole task off the list is worth more than most new features would be.

Why It Worked

The instinct with a gift voucher is to treat it as a small thing and handle it manually because the volume seems low. It is almost always the wrong call. Manual work does not scale, it clusters around the exact weeks you can least afford it, and it quietly caps how much you can sell.

Building it properly costs nothing extra on a pay monthly plan, because the build is included rather than quoted as a project. If your business sells anything that can be delivered without a human in the loop, our ecommerce web design page explains how we approach it, and our web design in Chester page covers the local side. You can also see what our customers say on our reviews page.

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