A salon haircare brand rebuilt to sell more online

Reviews existed but never appeared where anyone was deciding. Search was doing the job navigation should have been doing, which is usually the clearest sign a store has been built around the company rather than the shopper. That gap between a beautiful brand site and a working storefront is the most common problem in premium e-commerce. The identity is right, the photography is right, and the conversion rate sits a long way below what the products deserve, because nobody has designed the route from landing to basket. Information architecture, product discovery, merchandising and social proof get treated as content problems rather than the commercial decisions they are, and every extra click between a shopper and a decision quietly costs a sale. So we rebuilt it around one question: what is this person actually trying to do, and what is standing between them and the basket. That meant navigation built on shopper intent rather than product names, three routes into the range, a buying moment before the product page, reviews placed where the decision happens, and a rewards programme designed to turn a first order into a habit. Everything on the page had to answer to that question or come off.

Colour care is the hardest part of the range to buy without help. Shades, toners and treatments look alike to anyone who is not a stylist, and the wrong choice is easy to make. So the store asks rather than expecting people to know. The colour quiz takes a shopper through the questions one step at a time and ends on a recommended product they can add to the bag straight away. It does the job a stylist would do in the salon, at the point where an online shopper is most likely to give up.

The old store expected shoppers to know the range. Product names meant something to stylists and very little to anyone else, so people searched instead of browsing, and search can only find what you already know to ask for. The new navigation starts with what the shopper is trying to fix. On a phone, the menu opens into Hair goal, for people who know the problem but not the product, and into Shop by product type, for people who already know they want a shampoo or a treatment. Both routes lead to product pages with the price, the reviews and the add to bag button in view.

The brand already had a voice worth keeping. Lines like No appointment needed, and That just left the salon feeling every day, say what the range is for in the words a customer would use. The store now speaks the same way from the homepage spotlight to the product page and the bag. Nothing in the route switches into catalogue language at the moment someone is deciding, so the confidence the brand builds on the first screen is still there at checkout.