Creative Portfolio — Case 01
Saéa
I took a stock Shopify template and made the same visitor worth 2.4× more.
The
Problem
Saéa sold well-made objects through a default Shopify theme. Gallery, buy box, a block of paragraph copy, a reviews carousel, a product grid.
Nothing was broken. That was the problem.
The store showed the product. It never made the case for it. A visitor arriving from Instagram had no way to answer the only question that matters at $182: why this bowl and not a cheaper one. The brand had real differences. Natural stone instead of resin. Hand-carved instead of molded. Fair-wage artisans. Every piece one of a kind. None of it appeared on the page.
Conversion was running near half a percent.
The store as I inherited it. Stock Shopify template, early 2026.
The
Work
I rebuilt the storefront in Liquid. Two product-page templates — one for jewelry, one for home goods — each making a different argument. A new editorial layout. The brand voice and all on-page copy. Cross-sell on every page. Rebuilt cart and mobile menu, since mobile carries 64% of sessions. SEO across collection and product pages.
Paid traffic needed its own destination. A shopper coming from a feed has no context and no patience for a catalogue, so I built a separate magazine format for campaign landing pages.
- The comparison table. Stone vs resin, hand-carved vs mold, fair wage vs unknown supply chain — the objection handled on the page, before the visitor leaves to check Amazon.
- The spec block. Left column sells, right column proves. “Weight you feel first” beside “you notice it before you wear it.”
- Provenance, visible. FIG. captions, the artisan’s hands, the workshop dated and named.
- Pair with. Cross-sell, inline price and buy button.
The differentiation was true before I arrived. My job was to make it visible at the moment of decision.
The Voice
I wrote the copy and the document that governs it: the positioning, the guardrails, the locked lines, and the four-beat pattern every product page runs on. Anyone writing for this brand writes from that file.
Three rules do most of the work. Sell what the object does to a room, not the object itself. Publish the weight as a feature. Open on where the stone came from, never on its dimensions.
Older than influence.
Made by earth. Shaped by hand. Kept by you.
It’s heavy, it’s slow, it’s expensive. That’s how you know it’s real.
You can’t hand down a password.
Be heavy.
Copy and voice system by me. Five lines from the brand’s locked set.
Revenue per session
$0.68 → $1.67
The same visitor, worth 2.4× more.
| Before | After | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Conversion rate | ~0.52% | 1.19% | +127% |
| Add-to-cart rate | ~1.75% | 3.43% | ~2× |
| Average order value | ~$90 | $134.21 | +49% |
Sessions tripled in the same window on a paid social ramp I did not run — that traffic growth is not mine and I do not claim it. Every figure is a ratio. Ad spend buys the denominator, so it cancels out. Prices did not change, so the higher order value is basket size.
Shopify analytics, 15 April – 30 June 2026, against the equal-length window before launch.
The
System
The founder’s eye sets the direction. The brand is hers. My job is to write it down so the rest of the team can work from it.
A redesign happens once. Brand consistency has to happen every day, and it slips as soon as the person holding the standard leaves the room. So I built the standard into the tools.
The Saéa Edit. A magazine system running on Shopify’s native blog engine with a fully custom design: masthead, contents page, numbered features, FIG. captions, inline add-to-bag. Paid campaigns land here instead of on a product grid.
Who can operate it matters more than how it looks. A reusable template junior staff fill out from the Shopify backend without touching code. The copy runs on markdown instruction sets I wrote. I built the Klaviyo email templates the same way.
Scope · Creative direction · e-commerce design · copy · art direction · Liquid build · email program · SEO · creative operations
