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Café Rotkehlchen is a vegan café chain and cake bakery that has become a small institution in Cologne. Known for its warm atmosphere, playful branding, and handcrafted cakes, the Rotkehlchen experience is deeply personal and community-driven. As the business grew across multiple locations, their digital presence needed to evolve as well. The goal was clear: translate the café’s unique charm into a coherent online experience, while replacing manual cake orders with a proper shop built for growth. Together, we created a custom website and ordering system that feels just as welcoming as the cafés themselves – while quietly supporting the next phase of the business.
Café Rotkehlchen
Custom Code, Custom CMS
6 months
Café Rotkehlchen combines thoughtful vegan cuisine with a strong visual identity and clear values. Every café reflects care, creativity, and joy – qualities that needed to carry over online. At the same time, the business faced practical challenges behind the scenes: manual orders, high coordination effort, and limited scalability. From the start, this project was about more than design. It was about building a system that supports people, processes, and growth without losing the human touch.
The Rotkehlchen brand already had a strong personality and a loyal customer base. Our task was to give that personality a clear digital structure – playful and light on the surface, solid and reliable underneath. Together with the team, we focused on what matters online: clarity for customers, simplicity for staff, and smooth coordination between cafés and production. The result is a visual language that feels warm and familiar, supported by clear navigation and intuitive user flow.
A central part of the project was the new cake order shop. Instead of emails and messages, Rotkehlchen now uses a fully integrated ordering system tailored to their real workflow. The shop is built directly into the website and managed through our custom CMS. Role-based access gives the production team full control, while café staff can handle orders without touching content or technical settings. For customers, the experience feels simple and natural. Behind the scenes, it removes friction and creates operational clarity.
The platform was built with custom code and the PSWD CMS, ensuring performance, flexibility, and long-term maintainability. The site is fast, responsive, and easy to manage – allowing the team to update content and products independently. Before launch, we ran manual and automated quality checks to ensure stability and usability. Hosting and domain setup were integrated into the client’s existing infrastructure, keeping ownership fully in their hands, while still being managed by us to take effort off their plate (pun intended).