design+code
Fashion brands rarely ask us for a store that converts. They arrive with a look: a collection, a campaign, an art director's universe. The store has to carry that look, and then it has to sell. Those two demands pull in different directions more often than anyone admits, and most of our work on fashion stores happens where they meet.
A fashion store is judged in seconds on how the brand looks, before anyone has read a product description. That is why the design cannot be an afterthought. But a beautiful store that loses its visitors at the size selector is a lookbook with a cart. The identity is not negotiable, and neither is the path to the order.
So we treat every design choice as a commercial choice too. A full-bleed image on a collection page is a brand decision and a loading-time decision. A minimal product page is an aesthetic and a question of where the size and the add-to-cart button sit on a phone. We do not trade one for the other. We look for the version that keeps both.
On most of our fashion projects, the art direction comes from a studio we do not own and do not want to replace: Studio Avenir, Atelier Deux-Cé, Leslie David Studio, Bureau Joie, Bureau Fritiau, with Pan-Pan on web design. These are people with a point of view and a body of work. Our job is not to reinterpret their design. It is to build it, faithfully, in a theme a team can run for years.
That only works if the collaboration is close and starts early. Before the files are final, we read them as developers. How does this grid behave on a small phone? What happens when a product has many sizes, or a name twice as long as the one in the mock-up? Which interaction costs performance? Which one does the platform handle natively, and which one needs custom code? We bring those questions to the studio while changing something is still cheap, and we try to arrive with a proposal rather than a refusal.
The studio, in return, knows what we do not: why a margin is the size it is, which detail carries the identity, what can bend and what cannot. A developer who ignores that flattens the design. An art director who ignores the platform hands over a mock-up that cannot be built or maintained. Keeping both in the same conversation, from the first review to the launch, is most of the craft.
What we aim to hand over is a store the brand team can edit alone: a new collection, a new landing page, a new campaign, without a ticket to us and without breaking the design.
Conversion work on a fashion store is rarely a redesign. It is a short list of places where hesitation lives, and most of the fixes fit comfortably inside the art direction.
The cart. It is the highest-intent moment of the journey, and most stores waste it on a static list. For Archiduchesse, we added quiet suggestions from complementary categories inside the cart drawer, and the average order value went up.
Delivery and returns, early. Shipping times, the free-shipping threshold and the return policy in one sentence, shown before the customer reaches the card details. In our experience, the first reason for abandoning a checkout is uncertainty, not price.
Size and fit. A size guide that answers "which size should I order" rather than showing a chart, easy to find and readable on a phone. If a customer doubts the fit, nothing else on the page matters.
Photography in context. Studio shots show the garment cleanly, but they do not help someone imagine wearing it. For L'Île Bleue, adding images of the products in use next to the studio shots made a measurable difference to add-to-cart rates.
Reviews next to the button. Most themes bury them under the description. We move them close to add to cart, because that is where doubt sits.
Search and filters. They should follow the words customers use for the catalog, not the words of the internal product sheet.
We detail the method, the audit and the checkout work in why most Shopify stores lose customers at checkout. The theme question, custom or Theme Store, is in custom Shopify theme or Theme Store theme.
Many fashion brands come to us from another platform. Their old URLs already have history in search, and the unglamorous work decides the outcome: mapping old URLs to new ones, redirecting them, keeping the titles and structure that already work. The method is in migrating to Shopify without losing SEO.
Archiduchesse: full redesign. Development by us, art direction by Atelier Deux-Cé.
Lucas du Tertre: migration from PrestaShop to Shopify and a global redesign. Art direction by Studio Avenir, web design by Pan-Pan, development by us.
L'Île Bleue: full redesign on Shopify. Art direction by Bureau Joie, Shopify development and SEO / GEO by us.
Justine Ménard: migration from Squarespace to Shopify. Art direction by Bureau Fritiau, Shopify development and SEO / GEO by us.
Sarah Eisman Studio: fine jewelry, e-commerce on Shopify. Design by Leslie David Studio, Shopify build by us.
The Sagio: women's fashion house. Design by Studio Avenir, custom Shopify theme by us, in English, French and Italian.
If you run a fashion brand and are weighing a migration or a redesign, our approach is on the fashion page. You can also send us the brief at bonjour@dellamattia.com.