Solarium

A clothing brand wanted an online store and wanted to know, reasonably, whether we could build one worth having. That is a hard question to answer with a portfolio, because an ecommerce site is not a picture. It is a cart that has to work, a product page that has to sell, and a checkout nobody abandons.

So we stopped describing and started building. The brief we gave ourselves was the hardest version of the real one: invent a label from scratch, give it a reason to exist, and put it online well enough that someone would try to buy from it.

A solarium is a glass room built to grow what the climate outside will not allow. Tropical things, in a cold country, thriving because somebody decided they should. That is the whole brand in one word, and everything else came out of it.

Solarium makes clothes in the colours most labels talk themselves out of. Marigold, scarlet, flamingo, a blue that arrives before the person wearing it does. Small runs, forty pieces at a time, made for people who would rather be looked at than agreed with. The line we kept coming back to became the homepage: subtlety is a choice, and this is the other one.

The voice fell out of the premise too. It is dry, a little unimpressed, and it never oversells — a brand this loud visually has to be quiet in writing or the whole thing tips into shouting. “Not a coat for blending into anything” is the entire product description.

A brand built on colour cannot have a website that competes with it. So the storefront is almost entirely black, white and marigold, and every other colour on the page arrives in the photography. The product grid is a wall of clothes against a layout that gets out of the way.

The type does the shouting where the interface will not. Headlines set enormous and tight, product names small and plain, and a brand mark at the foot of every page big enough to read from across the room. It is a magazine that happens to have a cart in it.

A full storefront, about a week from the first sketch to a live URL. Brand, copy, art direction, a forty-piece catalogue, the theme, responsive layouts, product pages and a working cart — the same range of work a real build needs, which is why it is worth looking at rather than a mockup.

It is also quick, which matters more on a store than anywhere else. Pages open in around half a second with every image on screen, because there is no page builder underneath and nothing bolted on top. That is far easier to build in than to retrofit.

So: open it, click through it, put something in the cart, try to break it. That is what it is there for.