Case Study 02 · Women's Apparel & Accessories
From $50K to $118K a month: a full eCommerce rebuild.
Monthly Revenue
$50K$118K
Conversion Rate
1.1%2.6%
Returning Customers
12%27%
01 · The Situation
The website was a risk nobody had priced in.
A women's apparel and accessories brand had built something real. $50,000 a month in revenue, a loyal customer base, and a product range that was genuinely well-received.
But the website was held together with patches.
The theme was from 2018. It had been customised so many times by so many different freelancers that nobody fully understood how it worked anymore. During a major email campaign, the backend crashed completely. Orders were lost. Customers could not check out. The founder estimated they lost around $8,000 in a single afternoon.
That was the moment they decided to rebuild properly rather than keep patching.
"I knew the site was slow. I did not know it was a risk until we lost a full day of sales."
Founder
02 · The Diagnosis
Seven seconds to load, five steps to buy.
Audit Snapshot: Before
The checkout was five steps: billing, shipping, delivery options, payment, confirmation. On mobile, with a slow connection, customers were dropping out at step three consistently.
There was also no express payment option anywhere. No Apple Pay. No Google Pay. No PayPal. Every customer had to type out their full card details on a mobile keyboard.
Seven seconds to load on mobile. In fashion, losing a customer in the first seven seconds means losing them forever; they're back on Instagram before the page has appeared.
03 · The Architecture
Rebuilt from the ground up, not patched again.
Started from scratch. Every previous customisation evaluated, kept if it added value, discarded if it was just legacy code. Six workstreams, one modern foundation.
Build 01
Full WooCommerce rebuild on a lightweight theme
Not a redesign of the existing site: a complete rebuild on a modern, lightweight theme, optimised for mobile from the ground up.
Every previous customisation evaluated, kept if it added value, discarded if it was just legacy code slowing things down.
Build 02
Custom premium design
Matched the brand aesthetic the founder had been working toward but never achieved on the old theme. Clean. Editorial. Fashion-forward without being difficult to navigate.
Mega menu: category navigation with visual thumbnails.
Smart search: products surfaced by keyword and category.
Lifestyle PDPs: product pages built around how the item is worn, not just what it looks like.
Size guides: integrated on every product page, one click from the buy button.
Scarcity signals: low-stock indicators on products with fewer than 5 units remaining.
Build 03
Checkout rebuilt from 5 steps to 2
The entire checkout condensed into two screens, contact and delivery on screen one, payment on screen two.
Apple Pay, Google Pay, and PayPal added, a two-tap purchase for returning and mobile customers.
Build 04
Hosting migration
Moved from shared hosting to auto-scaling cloud infrastructure.
The site now handles campaign traffic spikes without degrading; the lost afternoon of sales becomes impossible to repeat.
Build 05
Retention and loyalty layer
Turned the new site into a retention engine, not just a storefront.
Email capture popup at 40 seconds; exit-intent popup for leaving new visitors.
Loyalty program built in; referral program with a customer-facing tracking dashboard.
AI product recommendations on cart and checkout, surfacing items that pair with the basket.
Build 06
Tracking rebuilt from scratch
GA4 properly configured with enhanced ecommerce events. Meta Pixel firing correctly on all conversion events.
Improved ad performance within the first two weeks, as the algorithm started receiving accurate purchase data.
04 · The Results
Six months later.
By month six, revenue had more than doubled, without any increase in ad spend. The rebuild paid for itself in month four.
05 · The Takeaway
A broken website doesn't just cost you sales. It costs you the compounding value of every customer it drives away.
For a fashion brand where the purchase is emotional and visual, a 7-second load time is not an inconvenience. It is a brand experience problem. Customers form an impression of the brand from the website before they have seen a single product. A website that feels slow and clunky makes the brand feel slow and clunky.
The rebuild paid for itself in month four. Every month after that is compounding return on an investment that is now part of the permanent infrastructure of the business.
Your Brand Next
Every result here started with a diagnosis. Yours can too.
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