Leading Raw
Built ready for growth.
As a growing raw pet food brand, Leading Raw needed to prepare their site to scale. A migration from Wordpress to Webflow including a redesign built to sell and a structure built to grow, sets Leading Raw up for the future.
The brief.
Leading Raw came to us with a clear ask: bring the brand onto the same platform as the rest of Big Dog Australia's sites, and get it ready for the growth that's planned for it.
Underneath that were three things.
One platform. Several brands, one team. Consolidating onto Webflow means one set of rules and one way of working, rather than maintaining two.
Room to grow. More recipes, more stockists, and paid media pointing at the site. A setup that's comfortable for a small range is a different proposition once you're spending money to send people there.
Elevate and automate. Give the brand dedicated design attention, improve the customer experience, and take the manual work out of keeping the site current.
At a Glance
Client: Leading Raw, one of the brands manufactured by Big Dog Australia
Scope: Platform migration, UX and design, ERP integration, CMS architecture, accessibility, SEO and AEO.
Built with: Webflow
Live: September 2026
Our approach.
01 - Structure first.
Before designing pages we needed to get the structure right. This means figuring out where things sit and what the customer journey looks like first and foremost.
02 - Native first.
Every custom thing built requires maintenance. To keep it simple we used a native-first approach, reaching for custom code options only where the functionality required it.
03 - Automate as a rule.
We don't want to create recurring admin tasks. Anything that could fall into that category gets automated, or linked to existing systems. Growth shouldn't create admin.
Structure based on the customer.
Most customers hit the home page and/or product pages, so these were where most of the time went.
Using heat maps from the existing site combined with internal customer knowledge, we looked at what people were actually doing, rather than working from assumptions.
We workshopped layout options properly, comparing structures before anything got designed.
That's how we landed on what appears before the fold, where content is surfaced vs sitting in an accordion. This set us up for a successful and well planned build.
Product pages that sell.
The product page is where the decision gets made, so we started by working out what someone actually needs to know before they'll switch their dog to raw.
- Everything in one place. Ingredients, nutritional analysis, storage and feeding amounts all sit on the product page.
- How much do I feed? The question that stalls most first-time raw feeders. A calculator answers it: pick a recipe, enter a weight, get portions per day and an approximate daily cost.
- Each recipe looks like itself. Puppy, Adult, Senior and Energy each carry their own colour through the whole page, so the range reads as a family while every product stays instantly recognisable.
- Feeding guidance that adapts. Puppy needs two age brackets. The others need one. The page handles both without maintaining two templates.
- Packaging you can actually read. A gallery with click to zoom, because people want to check the label before they commit.
Automation where it counts
Built to run itself.
The part of this project that will still be paying off in three years isn't visible on the page.
Add a product, and the site builds the page
Leading Raw adds a new product. Someone fills in the CMS entry: name, ingredients, nutrition, price, feeding values, colour, images. They publish.
The product page builds itself. The feeding chart populates. The recipe appears in the calculator and starts returning correct portions and costs. Related products pick it up. The colour flows through.
No developer. No ticket. No waiting on us. For a brand planning to expand its range, that's the difference between growth being a project and growth being a task.
Stockists that update themselves
The old store locator worked. What didn't scale was how it was fed: a list maintained by hand on a schedule, which is accurate right up until a stockist changes something.
Leading Raw's stockist data already lived in their ERP, which is the system the business actually trusts. So their in-house team built an API against it, and we built the CMS collection to receive it and the front end to display it. Stockist details now flow from the ERP to the map without anyone retyping anything.
Easy to find and to use.
We kept Leading Raw's search history by ensuring all URLs were appropriately mapped. We then further optimised SEO by creating structured data for all pages based on their content and ensured all metadata was up-to-date and optimised. This all makes it easy to find.
Then we ensured colours and tints were contrast checked before the build, not audited after. Feeding guides were marked up as real tables. ARIA labels were included where controls needed naming, alt text on every image, and headings that follow the content rather than the type sizes.
This accessible approach works two-fold, making it easier for all users as well as for LLMs and search engines.
The REsult
Where it landed.
Leading Raw now sits on the same platform as the rest of Big Dog Australia's brands, run by the same team using the same components.
The site is ready for the growth it's been built for. New recipes are a CMS entry. Stockists look after themselves. The pages that do the selling were designed against real data about how people use them. And there's somewhere solid to send paid traffic when the brand is ready to spend.
The best part of this project is the part nobody will notice: the site is now easy to keep up-to-date as part of business as usual.
“Kat completely transformed our Leading Raw brand, building a fantastic new website from the ground up. The fresh and modern user experience combined with the ability for our marketing team to manage content in-house has been a real game-changer for the business. As a trusted web partner that truly understands commercial needs from a consumer lens, I can't wait to work with Upstart Lane again on future projects.”
Pamela Olah • Marketing Manager, Leading Raw.
