The brief
A considered collection, trapped in a template.
Marie, the owner, put it plainly on our first call: "People walk into the shop and buy three pieces. They visit the website and leave." The store had real fans. The email list was strong, the Instagram engaged. But the site converted like a directory listing.
The problem wasn't traffic and it wasn't the products. It was that the theme flattened everything. The season's story, the styling and the pairings and the photography the team laboured over, lived on Instagram, while the website showed a grid of cut-outs on white. Shoppers arrived inspired and landed somewhere that undid the inspiration.
The build
Editorial first, checkout never more than one step away.
We rebuilt the storefront headless. Shopify kept doing what it does well (inventory, payments, tax) while a Next.js front end took over everything the customer sees. Sanity became the editorial desk, so the team could compose a lookbook page the way they compose a shop window, without waiting on me.
The design rule was simple: every image is shoppable, and the path from "I love that" to "it's in my bag" is one tap. Lookbook spreads carry inline product tags. Outfits add as a set. The product page borrows the lookbook's photography instead of the cut-outs.
It had to feel instant on a phone, because that's where the Instagram traffic lands. Static generation plus edge caching brought the lookbook in under a second on 4G. The shop's aesthetic, at app speed.
“For the first time the website feels like our shop, not a catalogue of our shop.”
The launch
The spring drop was the test. It passed.
We launched two weeks before the spring collection, quietly, and let the drop be the real benchmark. Add-to-cart rate rose 31% against the previous season, and the "shop the look" sets, which hadn't existed before, drove nearly a fifth of revenue in the first month.
The number Marie quotes, though, is a different one: zero. That's how many times her team has needed me to update the homepage since launch. The lookbook is theirs now.