Since 1977, Prairie Restorations, Inc. has stood as one of the pioneering companies in the United States dedicated to the restoration and management of native plant communities. We collaborated together to build a vibrant website that showcases their stunning plant photography and provides resources for creating a beautiful, eco-friendly landscape.
Prairie Restorations, Inc. is one of the pioneering native plant restoration companies in the United States. Based in Minnesota with five locations across the state, they offer large-scale ecological restoration services as well as wholesale plants and seeds for contractors, landscapers, and government organizations. Their retail garden centers serve individual homeowners who share their passion for native plants and sustainable landscapes.
The team at Prairie Restorations advocates for Minnesota’s native ecology, and that passion is evident in everything they do. However, when they came to Iceberg, their existing e-commerce website was geared toward individual retail sales, and didn’t effectively tell their whole story or showcase the size and scale of their capabilities.
From the beginning, we approached this project strategically. As a bunch of plant nerds ourselves, we immediately connected with the ecological mission of Prairie Resto, but we wanted to make sure we were building something that matched their long term business strategies and had a manageable course of action. Using our strategic process, what started as a website consultation has become one of our most ambitious and rewarding ongoing client relationships.
Prairie Restorations initially had a specific request: migrate their existing Zoho-based website to WooCommerce. But before starting any development work, we did what we always do. We asked questions.
Their business runs on Zoho as an ERP, and Zoho doesn’t play nicely with WooCommerce. Building what they asked for would have created a fragile connection between their website and the systems running their business day-to-day.
Our recommendation was to separate the two sides of their online presence into a custom WordPress marketing website that could showcase the full breadth of their services, and a separate retail platform that could integrate smoothly with their existing systems. They ultimately landed on Square for retail (a natural fit with Zoho) while Iceberg focused on the bigger picture: telling their story.
We’re not here to sell an e-commerce website. We’re here to solve a problem. Sometimes that means steering a client away from what they think they want and toward what will actually serve their business.
With a clear strategy in place, we got to work on what Prairie Restorations needed most–a marketing website worthy of their mission.
The existing site was built around a retail e-commerce experience, and did little to convey the scale and expertise behind their restoration services. The new site needed to do the opposite and lead with their passion while showcasing the breathtaking landscapes they create.
For this initial project phase we provided content writing, custom design, custom development and ongoing hosting and maintenance. One of our favorite details of this project is that every image on the site is their own. We had a strict no stock photography policy. We complemented their photography with colorful illustrations throughout the site, adding a warm, approachable feel that carries their personality into every page.
The result is a website that captures the full story of their business. From full restoration services to wholesale supply and retail garden centers, every aspect of their mission is equally represented.
We also built out several foundational features at launch: an events calendar with online ticket purchasing for their workshops, newsletter signup integration, online bill payment, and form integration connecting leads directly to their CRM.
After the marketing site was live and our relationship was blooming (pun intended), we set to work on a long-term vision of theirs: building a sophisticated online tool that could help visitors identify the right native plants for their project.
But before anything user-facing could be built, we needed to map out the back-end infrastructure. This phase of the project was all about establishing a system to house Prairie Restorations’ entire native plant library and detailed plant characteristics in a structured, searchable way.
Each plant entry contains comprehensive data including plant names, images, growing conditions and bloom information. Each entry also needed to include a geographic range map stored down to the street level–a level of specificity that would prove critical in the phases ahead.
Once the back-end was ready, we handed data entry off to the Prairie Resto team. Their staff is familiar with the plant data, and this approach kept the project moving without ballooning the budget. Today the database holds 347 plants and counting.
Prairie Restoration had a vision to automate this process, but getting there would take a very deliberate approach, building each new layer on top of the previous one.
With the database built and populated, it was time to bring it to life on the front end. Phase 3 focused on making the Native Plant Directory a publicly accessible, searchable library of every plant in the Prairie Restorations catalog.
Visitors can browse the full collection and filter by growing conditions to narrow down plants that fit their site. Clicking into any plant reveals the full plant details and images. It’s a genuinely useful resource for anyone researching native plants, and it laid the groundwork for what was coming next.
We now have the foundation for the next phase of the project, a custom-built interface to automate the plant selection process. Here is where things really start to get interesting!
Presto is a fully interactive online tool that guides users through six steps: sun exposure, soil type, soil moisture, plant community, plant type, and finally location and contact information. Each step uses simple language, custom icons, and descriptive imagery to make the process approachable for someone without a technical or plant-nerd background.
Behind the scenes, every plant in the database is scored against each of those variables. A plant that thrives in full sun scores high for that condition and low for shade. This complex scoring system was created by the experts at Prairie Resto, and required manual calculations to rank plants by these factors (which means it was expensive and time-consuming). Now, their valuable expertise can be distributed widely for anyone to use.
Just in case this project wasn’t already nerdy enough, our next challenge was to establish a system for geographic mapping. Each plant has an established growth map that shows, down to the street level, where the plant will grow. These maps needed to be translated into a geoJSON file so that Presto could query the user’s address against those boundaries in real time. (Shoutout to our amazing developer Nikolay who led this). Two neighbors across the street from each other could receive different plant recommendations based on these growth maps.
The final Presto result is a ranked list of native plants sorted from highest to lowest compatibility for the user’s target location. From there, users can print their results as a formatted PDF, or access the results from an email link that is automatically generated.
On the back end, every Presto submission is stored with a unique token, giving the Prairie Restorations team a database of entries they can use for marketing and in-person consulting.
To date, Presto has logged 1,432 submissions.
Our work with Prairie Restorations is far from finished. The next phase in the roadmap is connecting Presto back to their retail store–surfacing which plants in a user’s results are available for purchase, which are seasonal, and which they can buy right now. It’s a natural evolution that closes the loop between the plant selector tool and the retail experience.
This project is a good example of what a long-term agency partnership can look like when both sides are invested in the outcome. Each phase built on the last, costs were spread out in a manageable way, and the end result is something neither of us could have mapped out in full on day one. We’re already looking forward to what comes next.
AI-assisted development has genuinely expanded what’s possible for our clients, and this partnership is proof of that.
Struggling with how to present and organize all of your product information? Our team excels at content organization projects. Give us a call at 763-350-8762 or contact us online. Let’s work together to create a website that showcases all your company has to offer.
