Celestia Clothing

Celestia's previous storefront ran on a generic Shopify theme. The product — considered, minimal clothing at a premium price point — was competing visually with the same template used by mass-market competitors half its price. Navigation chrome and promotional banners were doing more talking than the garments were.

We reviewed session recordings from the existing store and found high bounce rates on product pages specifically, concentrated on mobile, alongside low add-to-cart conversion despite reasonable traffic. Looking at comparable premium apparel brands, the pattern was consistent: the sites that read as premium said less, not more — fewer navigation items, fewer banners, more space around the product photography.

A storefront that gets out of the product's way: a reduced navigation bar, product pages built around large, unobstructed photography, and a single-page checkout with no upsell interruptions.

We wireframed against real campaign photography from the first draft rather than placeholder imagery, since pacing and crop decisions only make sense against the actual assets. Navigation reduction was tested with stakeholders before build — cutting categories down to what customers actually used, not what merchandising wanted to feature.

Built on Next.js with Shopify Hydrogen as the commerce layer, a custom cart drawer to avoid a full page reload at the moment of highest purchase intent, and an image pipeline tuned specifically for the brand's campaign photography.

A storefront that lets the product carry the story instead of competing with template chrome. (Specific conversion figures belong to Celestia and should be added here directly rather than estimated.)