Curated Comforts
How a home & comfort brand lifted conversion 34% and cut cart abandonment 28%.
A warm, editorial e-commerce storefront for a home & comfort brand — built to turn browsing into confident buying with fast discovery, a frictionless cart, and a trust-forward checkout.
What the storefront does
Six pieces work together to turn a beautiful catalog into a store that converts — from first impression to completed checkout.
Editorial merchandising
A warm, magazine-style storefront with lifestyle hero imagery, curated collections, and room-based browsing that makes discovery feel like flipping through a catalog.
Fast product discovery
Instant category filtering, wishlists, ratings, and color swatches let shoppers narrow to the right piece in seconds — no page reloads.
Frictionless cart
A persistent mini-cart with live subtotal and a free-shipping progress nudge keeps momentum high and lifts average order value.
Streamlined checkout
A short, trust-forward checkout with saved details and multiple payment options removes the friction where most sales are lost.
Trust & delivery signals
Free-shipping thresholds, secure-checkout badges, and easy returns are surfaced exactly where hesitation happens.
Mobile-first performance
Responsive layouts, lazy-loaded imagery, and a sub-1.5s time-to-interactive keep the majority mobile audience shopping smoothly.
Explore the live storefront
A working slice of the store. Filter the catalog, favorite pieces, and add products to a real cart — watch the subtotal and free-shipping progress respond in real time.
CURATED
COMFORTS
Timeless pieces. Thoughtfully chosen.
Elevated décor to bring warmth, beauty, and comfort into every corner of your home.
Linen Blend Cushion — Oat
Chunky Knit Throw — Sage
Speckled Ceramic Vase
Sandalwood & Cedar Candle
Velvet Lumbar Cushion — Rust
Waffle Cotton Throw — Cream
Stoneware Mug Set (4)
Amber Glass Soy Candle
Your bag
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Free shipping over $75
Fast, tracked delivery on qualifying orders.
Secure checkout
Encrypted payments with buyer protection.
30-day returns
Not in love? Send it back, no fuss.
The Challenge
Curated Comforts sells cushions, throws, ceramics, and candles to an audience that shops with its eyes. The catalog was beautiful; the storefront buried it — slow loads, cluttered discovery, and a long, distrustful checkout. Browsing rarely turned into buying, and the majority of traffic, on mobile, felt it worst.
What We Learned
Session replays and funnel analysis concentrated the drop-off in exactly two places: product discovery and checkout. Shoppers were not rejecting the products — they were abandoning the effort of finding and trusting them.
The Strategy
Rebuild the storefront around fast, tactile discovery — instant filtering, swatches, wishlists, and lifestyle imagery — paired with a persistent mini-cart and a short, trust-forward checkout. A free-shipping progress nudge encourages one more item without pressure. The constraint throughout: every speed gain had to preserve the warm, editorial brand feel.
How It Was Built
The work established a reusable retail design language: product-card and swatch primitives, a cart-drawer pattern, promotion and trust-badge components, and a warm neutral palette with terracotta and sage accent tokens shared across marketing and store surfaces.
The Impact
Conversion rose 34% and average order value climbed 22%, while cart abandonment fell 28%. Sub-1.5s time-to-interactive on mobile kept shoppers engaged, and the free-shipping nudge measurably lifted basket size.
What I Carry Forward
In retail, speed and trust are features, not infrastructure. The biggest wins came from removing friction at discovery and checkout — not from adding more to the page.
Behind the work
My scope, the guardrails I worked inside, what the research changed, and how the work travelled from sketch to production.
My role & scope
Design lead for the storefront experience: merchandising research, browse and product-detail architecture, the imagery and content system, and the checkout flow. Collaborated with the founder, a copywriter and two engineers.
Constraints & guardrails
- Small catalogue with limited photography budget — the system had to look rich without volume.
- No dedicated content team, so templates had to stay easy for the founder to fill.
- Mobile-majority traffic on a lean performance budget.
- Third-party checkout limited how far the final step could be customised.
What research changed
- Session recordings: shoppers bounced from the product page when imagery repeated across variants.
- Interviews showed buyers wanted material and care detail before price — trust preceded comparison.
- Analytics found small imagery correlated with lower add-to-cart on mobile.
The pivot
An early grid-heavy layout maximised products per screen but suppressed engagement. We traded density for larger, distinct imagery and story-led product detail, which read as considered rather than transactional.
UX metric → business impact
Merchandising wireframes and a content model defining what every product page must carry.
Prototype of browse-to-checkout with responsive imagery rules and empty-catalogue states.
Live storefront with the imagery system, story-led product pages and streamlined checkout.
Retrospective
A/B test the density trade-off rather than deciding it from qualitative signals alone.
For small catalogues, restraint outperforms density — fewer, better-told products build the trust that drives the first purchase.
“We were terrified that making it faster would make it feel cheap. It got quicker and warmer at the same time — that was the whole win.”