Ecommerce website design & development, end to end

Premium brands are pushed toward templates that flatten them. The brief was to prove that a small atelier can have an interface as considered as its product — without sacrificing the commercial machinery a real store needs.

Three constraints framed the build: it had to feel editorial rather than transactional, it had to be genuinely fast with real photography, and every flow had to work end to end rather than being a static mock-up.

We mapped the shopping journeys that matter for a considered-purchase catalog: the browser with no intention, the gift-giver with a deadline, the researcher comparing materials, and the returning client who already knows what they want.

Each journey received its own entry point — an editorial homepage, a four-question gift finder, long-form buying guides, and predictive search with recent history.

Discovery is asymmetric on purpose. A single hero product carries a section while three supporting pieces orbit it, which mirrors how a merchandiser would dress a window and avoids the flat four-column grid.

Every filter, sort and variant control is keyboard operable, announced to assistive technology and mirrored in a mobile drawer rather than being shrunk down.

A light-luxury system: warm ivory, cream, sand and champagne with a single restrained bronze accent, a Cormorant Garamond display face against Inter for interface text, hairline rules instead of cards, and shadows used only where elevation is real.

Photography is given room. Product imagery is never cropped into a badge-covered tile.

Faceted filtering across category, price band, colour, size and availability with instant client-side sorting on featured, newest, price and best-selling ordering.

A rating filter was deliberately excluded: no verified review data exists for a demonstration catalog, and inventing one would be dishonest to both shoppers and search engines.

The Style Concierge resolves intent — discovery, gifting, outfit building, budget, comparison, sizing, care, shipping and cart assistance — then retrieves products from the catalog. The retrieval always happens first, so the assistant cannot invent a product, price or stock level.

Where a model provider key is configured, the same grounded context is handed to a language model to phrase the reply. Recommendations elsewhere on the site are scored on category, collection, mood and price proximity against the visitor's own session history.

Next.js App Router with a typed catalog for statically rendered browse pages, and PostgreSQL via Drizzle ORM for the transactional layer: orders, order items, order events, wishlist, reviews, analytics events, concierge transcripts and leads.

Money is stored in integer minor units, and order totals are always recalculated server-side from catalog prices — a client-supplied total is never trusted. The payment step is a mock interface: no card data is requested, transmitted or stored.

Browse pages are statically rendered, imagery is served through the Next image pipeline in AVIF and WebP with explicit sizes and lazy loading below the fold, and animation is limited to transform and opacity so it stays on the compositor.

The interface honours prefers-reduced-motion throughout, and the custom cursor is disabled entirely for touch input and reduced-motion users.

Mobile is designed, not shrunk: a dedicated navigation drawer, swipeable product galleries with position indicators, a filter drawer, a sticky add-to-cart bar that appears after the fold, and a checkout that keeps the summary one tap away.

Clean URLs, one primary intent per template, canonical tags on every page, Open Graph and Twitter metadata, and JSON-LD for Organization, WebSite, BreadcrumbList, Product, Offer, CollectionPage, Article and FAQPage — emitted only where it mirrors visible content.

Aggregate ratings are deliberately absent. Internal linking runs product → category → collection → journal → buying guide, so topical relationships are explicit for both crawlers and language-model retrieval.