Soft Power.
A 14-year-old Parisian label was beautiful but invisible. We rebuilt the brand from the wordmark out and shipped a storefront that finally matched the clothes.
- Client
- Independent fashion house
- Year
- 2026
- Scope
- Identity · Web · E-com · Direction
- Duration
- 11 weeks · 4 people
The challenge.
The studio had built a cult following the hard way — beautiful tailoring, ten years of word-of-mouth, almost no online presence. The previous site read like a placeholder. Customers landed and bounced. Wholesale was carrying the brand.
The brief, in their words: "Make us legible online without making us boring." Translation: keep the editorial soul, lose the friction, and start converting search traffic that was already finding the brand.
Soft Power.
Fig. 01 — Homepage, desktop. Headline rebuilt around the seasonal thesis.
Approach.
We started with the wordmark, not the website. The brand needed a centre of gravity before we could redesign anything around it. From there we built outward: a single editorial type system, a colour story drawn from the FW26 fabrics, and a grid loose enough to feel like a magazine but disciplined enough to ship.
- Wordmark · redrawn from scratch, tighter spacing, single italic counterpart
- Type system · one display serif + one mono for credits, nothing else
- Colour · five tones pulled from the actual collection, no neon
- Grid · 12-col editorial, with intentional negative space
- Storefront · Shopify Hydrogen, headless, sub-second page loads
- Content engine · journal and lookbook on one editorial template
Identity system.
The palette is built around what the clothes are actually made of — bone, ink, sun, stone, moss. No fluorescents, no gradients, no concessions to the algorithm.
Build & launch.
We shipped on Shopify Hydrogen for the storefront and a custom editorial CMS for the journal. The studio's small team can now publish a full lookbook in an afternoon instead of a week. We trained them on it during week 10 and stayed embedded for the first two drops post-launch.
- Stack · Shopify Hydrogen · Sanity CMS · Vercel · Cloudflare
- Performance · 97 mobile · 100 desktop on Lighthouse, all routes
- Handover · 3-day workshop, 40-page playbook, 90 days of in-house support
"They rebuilt our brand in eight weeks of design and three of code. We doubled revenue the quarter after launch. They figured out what we were trying to say before we knew how to say it."Founder & Creative Director — Independent fashion label