Sackcloth & Ashes runs on a rare tension: a mission‑led brand that has to convert. As the storefront expanded from a single product line into a multi‑partner ecosystem spanning collaborations, gifting flows, and seasonal campaigns, the job was keeping every entry point as clear as the first one.
Over 5+ years as the lead designer, I directed small teams and worked solo to build the systems that held the experience together through launches, partnerships, and constant iteration.
As the brand expanded, the storefront became a multi-entry ecosystem. Customers could arrive through campaigns, collaborations, collections, gifting flows, impact storytelling, or direct product intent. Every path still needed to converge into a clear purchase journey.
The risk was experience drift.
As launches and page types multiplied, small inconsistencies scaled quickly:
The challenge wasn't just keeping things looking consistent. It was making sure every new launch, partner page, and seasonal push still felt like part of the same storefront. Without a shared foundation, things would drift until the whole experience needed rebuilding.
Not everyone landing on the site was there for the same reason. Knowing who was actually visiting shaped what the storefront needed to do.
Often buying for someone else, usually around a holiday. They know roughly what they want. They just need to confirm it arrives in time and that sizing is clear. The brand story can wait.
They've bought before. They care about where the blankets go and what they fund. They browse new collections, respond to launches, and are likely to tell people. The story has to actually earn the purchase.
Got here through a collab they already knew: Disney, National Geographic, Subaru. They don't know Sackcloth & Ashes yet. If the landing page feels like a dead end, they leave.
Not shopping retail. They're figuring out whether Sackcloth & Ashes is the right partner for company gifting or a branded collaboration. Usually several visits before they reach out.
Full UX/UI across the storefront: information architecture, navigation, page structure, and the templates that made new launches possible. Reordering PDPs to put practical information first was the change most clearly tied to fewer scroll-back patterns in session replays.
Page templates and interaction patterns built to support any collaboration launch without rebuilding from scratch. Disney, Subaru, and National Geographic all got pages that felt specific to them. Underneath, the same structure.
Collection structure, product pages, the cart, and everything up to the checkout button. Simplifying cart entry and surfacing shipping timelines earlier visibly reduced the hesitation we saw in replays during the holiday season.
Analytics, replay analysis, QA, and ongoing UX iteration. Lucky Orange session replays showed where people were getting stuck. That's what drove most of the prioritization.
Making sure everything held up across devices, breakpoints, and edge cases. The same architecture supported five years of launches, seasonal peaks, and partner collaborations without needing a rebuild.
E-commerce rarely fails because of visuals. It fails when the system becomes inconsistent under real customer behavior. Sackcloth & Ashes had to balance four tensions most storefronts avoid.
Mission and meaning must build trust without slowing down purchase decisions. Every storytelling element needed to earn its place.
Collaborations and collections need distinct creative expression while underlying interaction patterns remain intuitive and reusable across every launch.
Browsing is not buying. The experience must support discovery while still converging into clear next actions without asking either journey to compromise.
Reduce unnecessary steps while preserving the guidance needed to minimise hesitation and drop-off. Confidence, not speed, drives completion.
As more collaborations and launches came in, it became clear the storefront needed a consistent foundation. Something that could flex for new campaigns without breaking what was already working. I built it around configurable Shopify sections that the team could manage without touching code.
What the architecture needed to solveNavigation, collections, product pages, and the cart all followed the same logic, wherever someone entered.
Collaborations could have their own creative identity without changing how the storefront worked underneath.
Pages could be assembled and updated in Shopify's editor without touching code for every new launch.
Everything had to hold up across devices and edge cases, through years of changes and new launches.
Early on I worked closely with engineers for anything beyond Shopify's default capabilities. Over time I took on more of the front-end directly: not just the design layer, but the Liquid templates, section schemas, and how the whole thing was structured and maintained.
Markup patterns that kept hierarchy intact and stayed readable across breakpoints.
Flexible section settings so the team could build and manage pages in Shopify without writing custom code.
Styles scoped to each section to avoid conflicts across launches without diverging from the design language.
JS only where it genuinely improved the experience. Nothing added for its own sake.
The goal was never complexity. Just systems that still made sense a year later when someone else was managing them.
I tracked the funnel through Shopify analytics, watched behavior through Lucky Orange session replays, and ran A/B tests where a decision needed a direct comparison. I also looked at how other brands handled the same tensions.
More sessions came in through campaigns and collabs, but people still needed to land somewhere with a clear path to purchase.
Campaign traffic would need its own approach. Different people, different intent, different flows for each entry point.
Analytics told a different story. Collaboration traffic added to cart at roughly the same rate as direct visitors when the page structure was clear.
Built templates that kept the same structure underneath, whatever the creative looked like on top.
When someone opens the menu twice in a session, they're lost, not browsing. That pattern showed up repeatedly. We simplified the navigation and made the primary paths more obvious.
The strongest pages answered what it is, who it's for, why it matters, and when it ships. The mission story came after, not before.
Mission content before product specs was slowing people down. They needed the practical stuff first before they could engage with the story.
Lucky Orange replays showed scroll-back patterns on PDPs: people scrolling into the mission content, then scrolling back up to re-read specs before adding to cart.
PDP order flipped: specs and shipping info first, brand story after the add-to-cart.
The replay evidence pointed one way, so we compared the two hierarchies directly rather than assuming the answer.
Because Sackcloth & Ashes is a mission-driven brand, we believed giving the mission greater prominence on the PDP could strengthen trust and purchase confidence.
Ran in Intelligems: a mission-first hierarchy against a product-first one leading with product, practical information, shipping confidence, and purchase actions before brand storytelling.
The product-first experience made it easier for high-intent shoppers to reach the information needed to make a purchase decision, with less friction and backtracking.
Product and purchase confidence became the primary hierarchy, with the Sackcloth mission reinforcing the buying decision rather than interrupting it.
During gifting peaks, fewer choices and clearer shipping info lowered drop-off without flattening the brand experience.
During the gift-giving season, people were leaving because shipping info was too hard to find and there were too many optional steps in the way.
Shopify analytics showed higher cart abandonment in November and December. Replays showed people hunting for shipping info and hesitating in the cart.
Gifting pages redesigned: delivery timelines up front, fewer optional steps. Hesitation patterns in Lucky Orange dropped after the change.
When mission messaging felt like an honest invitation rather than pressure, it worked better. We shifted the copy away from urgency toward something more grounded. Trust went up, not down.
As the system settled, the clearest improvements showed up at the moments that mattered: people moved through the funnel more confidently, completed checkout more often during high-intent periods, and the team shipped faster with less rework.
Peak conversion across the engagement, up from a 0.72% early baseline. The number moved a lot over five years with traffic mix and campaigns. The UX work consistently improved the parts it could control.
Checkout completion improved during seasonal and campaign-driven traffic. Gifting period drop-off fell after reducing optional choice and prioritising shipping confidence language.
Reduced QA complexity across campaigns and collaborations through shared interaction rules and reusable launch systems.
The system let the team launch faster, iterate with less risk, and run more campaigns without the experience falling apart. The result was a storefront that stayed coherent through five years of growth, collaborations, and constant change.
Not every direction held. Two structural decisions were revised after behavioral data made the problem visible enough to act on.
Navigation structured around brand narrative. Mission and story framed the entry point. Product categories were secondary. Shopify's native search returned poor results, creating dead ends.
High exit rates after navigation interactions. Session replays showed people opening the menu multiple times without ever landing on a product page. Not browsing. Lost. Search wasn't helping either.
Navigation restructured to lead with products first: categories by occasion, style, and collection. Mission content moved to its own pages, something people could choose to visit rather than pass through.
Reduced menu re-opens in session replays. Clearer product discovery paths. Mission content retained its credibility because it was no longer blocking the purchase flow.
A checkout-focused cart. Clean, but passive. Just items and a button. No shipping motivation, no cross-sell, nothing that made adding another item feel worthwhile.
Lucky Orange replays showed significant time spent in the open cart without checkout progression. Users appeared to be second-guessing rather than buying. Cart drop-off was higher than expected given add-to-cart rates.
Added a free shipping progress indicator and a "Complete With" cross-sell section. The recommendation logic was not treated as settled: we compared several approaches before landing on complementary, lower-priced, and collaboration items. Showing another full-price blanket asked too much; a contextual, low-friction addition asked very little.
Cart-to-checkout progression improved. Average order value increased among users who engaged with the cross-sell. The shipping progress bar gave hesitant buyers a concrete reason to add rather than abandon.
Five years on this taught me a few things that kept proving themselves, whatever the context.
Trust comes from clarity, not persuasion
Mission messaging works when it feels honest. The second it feels promotional, it loses the thing that made it worth anything
Gifters want speed and confidence, not more choices. Fewer decisions meant more completions
Cross-sells only work if they feel like a useful suggestion, not something you have to close
The implementation is the design. If it breaks when someone edits it in Shopify, it wasn't finished
Build things that stay readable when someone else touches them
If the pattern is the same everywhere, users don't have to figure it out twice
The Liquid and schema structure is part of the design. It's what protects the experience when content changes
Clarity is the feature that survives every launch
Explore sackclothandashes.com to see the storefront in context — from storytelling and collaboration launches through product discovery and checkout flow.
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