It’s Monday, I’m Nithya Sudhir. I collect words, chase patterns, and write about whatever makes me curious.
The Graza Effect
I want to tell you about an olive oil brand.
Not because I want you to switch oils. Because I want you to look at what they built.
The website impressed me so much, I bought all their products.
It is truly a masterclass in DTC website design.
Interface Instincts is my series on the design decisions that turn browsers into buyers. So far, we’ve covered the search bar, and the wishlist heart. This edition is a full breakdown.
It’s Monday. Let's go.
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Graza is a single-origin extra virgin olive oil brand that launched in January 2022 and sold out within 24 hours, with no paid ads.
By mid-2025 they were stocked in over 11,000 stores and had become the fifth largest national olive oil brand in the US, representing roughly a quarter of olive oil category growth that year.
Here is every element that caught my attention, the psychology behind it, and what you can steal for your own site.
01: The HERO video, I'm hungry
The first thing you see on graza.co is a warm kitchen. Someone cooking. Oil being squeezed with casual confidence.
It made me feel hungry before anything else. And did you know that hungry consumers are willing to pay more than when satiated?
Semantic Priming: What you see first shapes how you interpret everything that follows.
A hero video is usually an ecommerce "no-no" — it slows load time and conventional wisdom says get to the product fast.
Graza’s hero activates the feeling of being someone who cooks with confidence and uses good oil without overthinking it.
Every brand has a first impression. What do you want that to be?
Their entire palette is warm beige. Soft cream. Muted everything. And then bam! A lime green CTA button that your eye finds instantly without trying.
Color Psychology: Specific colors activate specific emotional responses before the brain processes any words.
Each product and section in Graza has its own color energy.
Yellow signals energy and appetite. Green signals freshness and nature.
The neon colors just make everything on the website POP!
Give every page on your site one dominant colour with a clear emotional job.
03: Eliminate the research, name products better
Sizzle. Drizzle. Frizzle. Every name tells you exactly when to use it. No acidity percentages. No region names. No confusion.
The Paradox of Choice: More options produce less satisfaction and slower purchase decisions.
Graza names products around behaviour, not specs.
You instantly know which one you need.
And if you want all three, there's a Trio bundle. Decision made in seconds.
Also notice the small oval labels on each product card: FINISHING OIL. COOKING OIL. HIGH HEAT COOKING OIL. One line. No further explanation needed. That is Cognitive Ease: the easier a label is to process, the more trustworthy it feels.
04: Give it a soul with illustrations
Every illustration on this site is hand-drawn, consistent, and completely unnecessary for selling oil. That is exactly why they work.
Anthropomorphism: Humans form emotional attachment to objects they perceive as having personality.
The illustration style communicates warmth and craft.
It makes every product instantly recognisable at a glance.
It makes the bottles native to social without any effort.
05: Everything you need on the product page
There is a tab on the product page telling you exactly how many olives go into one bottle of Drizzle. It is 5,000, if you were wondering.
Transparency Effect: When a brand voluntarily shares information it did not have to share, trust increases disproportionately. The more specific the detail, the more credible the entire brand becomes.
Most DTC product pages are built around what the brand wants you to know.
Graza's is built around every question you might actually have.
When a customer cannot find an answer, they usually assume the worst.
The trust piece, what really fills the gap, is what makes someone go from interested to convinced.
06: Recipes, from the cooks, for the cooks
Short ribs. Dips. Wings. Pasta. A rotating carousel of things you could make using Graza’s products. I mean, I get excited when I see a recipe on the packet of a product I just bought, this is Disneyland for me!
Aspirational Identity: People do not buy products. They buy the version of themselves that uses the product.
Recipe sections are usually an afterthought. Graza puts theirs in the main scroll.
Every recipe is the brand saying: this is the kind of cook you become when you have this on your counter.
How easily can your customer picture themselves using your stuff?
07: Customer photos, unpolished proof or a perfect testimonial
The review section is not a star rating grid. It is real people using the product in real kitchens. Avocados. Eggs. A bowl of pasta. Every photo is someone else telling you it is worth it. I believe them for sure!
Social Proof: When people are uncertain, they look to others' behaviour to decide their own.
Graza's review section feels like a community.
Verified buyers, specific use cases, photos from actual kitchens.
Even if its a two-word review, Graza’s testimonial section makes each one count.
08: The cart upsell, the sale isn't over until the check out
I like that it shows me 4 other relevant products on the checkout cart.
The Foot in the Door Effect: Once someone has committed to a purchase, the likelihood of accepting an additional one increases significantly. The first yes lowers the resistance to the second.
Graza treats the cart as one more touchpoint.
The upsell is not a pop-up interrupting the experience, it is built into the cart itself
The upsell also makes practical sense — you just bought the bottle, the refill can is the logical next purchase.
Relevance is what makes a cart upsell feel helpful rather than pushy.
Have you ever bought something purely because of how it looked?
Graza surveyed hundreds of people and found that less than one percent of consumers knew what "extra virgin" actually meant — despite it being the number one quality they claimed to want.
And they started with a question: why do people buy something they cannot explain?
Their change:
Stop explaining the oil.
Start removing the guilt around using it.
Stop talking about acidity grades.
Start naming products after what you do with them.
Stop making it precious. Put it in a squeeze bottle.
I went to graza.co to do research. I left with three products in my cart and a genuine craving for pasta.
That is what good design does. It does not feel like design at all.
What is your brand doing to make the customer journey so smooth? Let me know!
I hope you enjoyed today’s issue!
Catch you next Monday!
How's the depth of today's edition?
As always, hit reply if something in here hits home.
See you next week,
Nithya
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