A storefront that finally loaded fast.

The challenge

Meadow Co. had the kind of product photography that makes you want to redecorate your entire flat. Hand-thrown ceramics, linen bedding dyed with garden-grown indigo, soap that smelled like a forest after rain. They'd built a loyal following on Instagram and a waitlist for every product drop.

But their website was actively losing them money. The old theme was a heavily customised Shopify template that took 6.4 seconds to load on a mid-range Android over 4G. Product pages stacked eight upsell widgets above the fold. The cart was a full-page redirect. And mobile — where 71% of their traffic lived — felt like an afterthought bolted onto a desktop layout.

Analytics told the story plainly: a 68% bounce rate on mobile, a cart abandonment rate north of 80%, and an average session that lasted just long enough to confirm the page hadn't frozen. People wanted to buy. The site wouldn't let them.

Our approach

We treated the rebuild as two projects running in parallel. One team redesigned every screen and interaction; the other rebuilt the storefront as a headless architecture, decoupling the front-end from Shopify's template constraints entirely. The goal was a site that felt instant on a phone in a tunnel.

• Strip the interface back to commerce. One product, one decision. We removed every widget that didn't help someone decide or buy, and rebuilt the product page around the photograph.
• Rebuild headless on a modern stack. Next.js front-end, Shopify Storefront API for cart and checkout, edge-cached product data. Pages went from 6.4s to 1.8s on mobile.
• Design the mobile experience first, not last. Thumb-reachable add-to-cart, a slide-in cart drawer, and a checkout that never left the page.
• Tell the sustainability story without lecturing. Carbon impact shown as a quiet line item, not a banner. Materials provenance one tap away for anyone who cared.

Our conversion rate on mobile doubled in the first month. I still can't quite believe it was the same product.

Building for speed

The performance work was the part nobody sees but everyone feels. We set a budget — 200KB of JavaScript on a product page, full stop — and engineered to it. Product imagery was served as responsive AVIF with blur-up placeholders. The cart drawer was prefetched the moment a product page loaded, so adding to cart felt like it happened before you clicked.

The design language stayed true to Meadow's existing warmth — we kept their muted, earthy palette and their commitment to generous whitespace — but tightened the typography into a system that could scale across 200+ products without falling apart. Every product card became a small, repeatable composition rather than a bespoke layout per category.

Outcomes

The relaunch shipped in eleven weeks. Within the first quarter, the metrics that mattered moved hard in the right direction.