Putting Wales’s biggest gift shop in front of every visitor to Cardiff before they arrive

Castle Welsh Crafts is the largest turnover gift shop in Wales, sat directly opposite Cardiff Castle. Family-run. Forty-five years of trading. Home to the world’s largest lovespoon and the world’s smallest.

If you’ve visited Cardiff, you’ve walked past it. Charlotte owns it, Ceri runs it, and between them they’ve built the shop every tourist ends up in: lovespoons, Welsh gold, rugby shirts, dragons, the lot. Footfall was never the problem. Thousands of people pass the door every day.

On the surface, a shop opposite a castle doesn’t look like it needs marketing.

But footfall is rented, not owned. The shop depended on people happening to walk past. Nobody was searching for it before their trip. Nobody was following it after. Online, a forty-five-year-old Welsh institution looked like any other souvenir shop, and the website wasn’t telling Google what made it different. The products that make the shop special, the heritage, the craft, the stories behind a lovespoon, were on the shelves but not on the screen.

The shop had the best location in Wales. Online, it had no location at all.

And the audience is unusually wide. Tourists planning a visit. Welsh families buying a christening gift. People overseas with Welsh roots looking for something that means home. Each of them searches differently, and the shop wasn’t showing up for any of them.

To grow, Castle Welsh Crafts didn’t need more people walking past. It needed people to know it was there before they got to Cardiff, and to remember it after they left.

We gave the shop a voice for the people who hadn’t walked past yet.

The insight was simple: the shop’s audience starts planning weeks before they reach the castle.

People searching for Welsh gifts, Welsh lovespoons and Welsh traditions aren’t standing on Castle Street. They’re at home, on a laptop, three weeks out. The shop was competing for footfall when it should have been competing for search. If Castle Welsh Crafts showed up when someone typed “welsh lovespoon meaning”, it would be the shop they walked into on purpose rather than by accident.

“A shop with this much history was being treated online like a souvenir stand. Forty-five years, two world records, products with actual stories behind them. None of that was on the website and none of it was on social. We just had to tell people what was already true.”Finn Hyett, founder of Proteus Digital

“Tourists don’t search for a shop. They search for a lovespoon. So we made sure the shop owned the lovespoon.”

The second insight was about the content itself. Welsh heritage is rich, visual and almost entirely unexplained to the people buying it. What does the pattern on a lovespoon mean? Why do people buy Welsh gold? What’s the story behind the dragon? Every product in the shop is a piece of content, and every piece of content is a reason to search, visit and buy.

The third was about consistency. A seasonal tourist business needs to be present all year, not just in August. Rugby internationals, St David’s Day, Christmas, graduation season. Each one is a different buyer with a different reason, and the content had to be planned around all of them.

Making Castle Welsh Crafts the answer to every Welsh gift search.

Our strategy was to make Castle Welsh Crafts the answer to every Welsh gift search, and the account people followed after they’d visited.

Full keyword research across Welsh gifts, traditions, and lovespoons guided a complete website rebuild. Product copy and metadata were restructured so search engines and social visitors recognized the shop as a heritage institution rather than a souvenir stand.

Monthly content was created around product heritage and stories, backed by a comprehensive company bible to maintain voice consistency. The world’s largest and smallest lovespoons were placed at the center of social campaigns as powerful visual hooks.

“The best thing about Castle Welsh Crafts is that nothing had to be invented. The history’s real, the records are real, the stories behind the products are real. Our job was to get it out of the shop and in front of people who were already looking for it, and give them a reason to look for the shop by name next time.”Finn Hyett, founder of Proteus Digital