Case study
An independent boutique on Sea View Street, Cleethorpes. Womenswear, accessories and homeware, bought a few pieces at a time — and a site built to read like the shop rather than like a template.
The build is live as a private preview while we wait on the shop's own stock list, prices and customer reviews. Anything not yet confirmed carries a visible marker until it is — so nothing on the page can be mistaken for the shop's word before the shop has given it.
The brief
B Boutique buys the way a small shop should: a few pieces at a time, chosen by hand, most of them the only one on the rail. The stock changes weekly and almost nothing is repeated. That is the whole proposition — you will not meet your coat coming the other way down the high street — and it is exactly the thing a template cannot carry.
The brief was a site that reads like the shop. It had to look considered rather than merchandised, survive stock that turns over every week, and work for the customer deciding whether it is worth the drive from Grimsby.
The approach
Bodoni Moda for the display voice, Inter for the prose, and nothing else. No rounded corners, no drop shadows, no pill buttons, no gradient anywhere — the restraint is what reads as expensive. Every colour decision was checked for contrast against the ground it actually sits on rather than against a global default.
Every photograph was directed to a single brief: garment still lifes on black marble and polished brass under warm window light from the left, category panels as studio shots on a muted seamless. Twenty-eight images that read as one day's shooting. A boutique whose photography looks bought is a boutique nobody believes.
Nine clothing categories, each with its own page and its own stock. A twenty-six piece shop with a page per item and a SumUp checkout. A real search over the catalogue — one that will not return a black coat for the query "black" unless somebody has confirmed the coat is black.
ClothingStore structured data carrying the address, the opening hours and the phone number, so a machine reading the page knows where the shop is and when it is open. That is what puts an independent shop into a local result and into an AI answer, rather than leaving it to a directory listing somebody else controls.
What changed
Every one of these was measured rather than assumed. They are the unglamorous half of the work, and they are the half that decides whether a site earns anything.
CLOTHING and ACCESSORIES both landed on a section of the home page — a link saying one thing and doing another. There are now real routes behind every item in the header, the menu and the footer, and every href resolves.
Of the nine clothing categories, four had no products at all: a label on an empty shelf, which reads as a broken shop rather than as a small range. Every category now lists actual stock.
It was set to `#top` — a bare fragment, meaning a section of whatever page you happen to be on, and #top only exists on the home page. So the one control everybody reaches for to get back to the start did nothing at all on four pages. Now it goes home from anywhere.
Measured against the rendered layout rather than trusted: the category card is 19.2vw wide at 1440px against a declared 30vw, and the homeware figures were over by a quarter and a third. Correcting them saves 53 KB on every desktop load, deterministically, with no visible change to the photography.
Held to
On results
The site has not launched yet, so there are no traffic or conversion figures to report — and we would rather say that than publish numbers nobody has measured. When it goes live, the figures land on this page.
Next step
Tell us what you sell and who you sell it to. We reply within one working day and book a call at a time that suits you — and we will say honestly if we are not the right studio for it.