MAISON ORÉ · Process

The full process

The research, personas and flows behind MAISON ORÉ. The case study covers the decisions; this is the work underneath them.

02 — User Research

User Personas & Goals

MAISON ORÉ's audience spans conscious luxury buyers seeking provenance, executive gift buyers who need seamless gifting options, and fashion editors discovering the brand's visual world.

👤
Sanya Kapoor
Conscious Luxury Buyer, 32
Goals
  • Verify materials and provenance before purchasing
  • Understand the garment's story and seasonal narrative
  • Discover new collections before they close
Pain Points
  • No material transparency or sourcing information visible
  • Generic product photography with no editorial context
🧑
Marcus Chen
Executive Gift Buyer, 41
Goals
  • Purchase considered gifts that signal taste
  • Confirm sizing guides are comprehensive
  • Arrange delivery with care notes and premium packaging
Pain Points
  • Checkout flow breaks the luxury feeling
  • No gift-wrapping or note options visible
👩
Layla Nair
Emerging Fashion Editor, 27
Goals
  • Discover the brand's visual world and atelier story
  • Source editorial contacts and press information
  • Understand seasonal narratives for feature coverage
Pain Points
  • No press or editorial section on the site
  • Missing lookbook download

03 — Business Challenges

Core Challenges

CHALLENGE 01
🎨
Silence as Design

Designing absence rather than presence. Every removed element had to communicate confidence, not emptiness. White space needed to feel intentional, not unfinished.

CHALLENGE 02
📱
Mobile Without Compromise

Luxury editorial layouts built for desktop often collapse on mobile into generic e-commerce. Maintaining the editorial feeling at 390px width required a fundamentally different mobile layout strategy.

CHALLENGE 03
🔒
The Trust Signal

Luxury fashion buyers need to trust before they transact. In a DTC context with no physical touchpoint, the page had to carry the full weight of brand legitimacy through typography, photography quality, and copy register.

CHALLENGE 04
⚡
Performance vs. Richness

High-resolution editorial imagery, video texture, and refined type rendering had to load fast enough to prevent bounce without compressing the richness that makes the brand feel premium.

04 — Secondary Research

Market Insights

FINDING 01
68%
Luxury Digital Conversion Gap

68% of luxury fashion buyers research online before purchasing, but only 12% convert on mobile-first sites. The gap is primarily attributed to trust signals and editorial quality, not price. (Source: McKinsey State of Fashion Digital)

FINDING 02
2.4x
Editorial Layout Conversion Lift

Fashion brands that adopted editorial-style layouts with whitespace-dominant design saw 2.4x longer session times and significantly lower bounce rates than grid-dominant product pages. (Source: Shopify Fashion Benchmark Report)

FINDING 03
91%
Material Transparency Drives Purchase

91% of Gen Z and Millennial luxury buyers want fabric composition and sourcing information visible on the product page — and 64% will abandon a purchase without it. (Source: Business of Fashion Consumer Survey 2024)

07 — User Flow

The Journey

STEP 01
Editorial Hero
The page opens into a full-screen editorial still — no navigation overlay, no hero copy above the fold. The brand name surfaces on scroll, earning attention rather than demanding it.
STEP 02
Collection Entry
Garments are presented in their seasonal "world" — atelier, field, coast — with environmental photography that places each piece in context. Visitors navigate by feeling, not category.
STEP 03
Product Deep Dive
Each garment page leads with a full editorial treatment: material provenance, construction notes, and care instructions before pricing. The buying intent follows the desire, not the other way around.
STEP 04
Trust Signals
Atelier biography, process photography, and sizing philosophy build brand legitimacy. Social proof is editorial ("worn by", "as seen in") not metric-driven ("4.9/5 stars").
STEP 05
Considered Checkout
A linear, single-page checkout that maintains the editorial register. Gift note, sustainable packaging toggle, and delivery choice presented with the same typographic weight as the product page.

08 — Toolkits

Tools & Workflow

Tools and methods used throughout the MAISON ORÉ design process — from luxury market research through to editorial first visual execution.

🎨FigmaUI Design
✏️Fraunces & Hanken GroteskTypography
📐Claude CodeFrontend Build
🗺️FigJamConcept Mapping
📷MidjourneyVisual Direction

09 — Process

From brief to atelier
in eight weeks.

The brief was deceptively simple: design a luxury fashion brand that communicates restraint. The process was anything but simple. It involved competitive brand analysis, multiple rejected visual directions, and a fair amount of productive disagreement with ourselves about how much white space is too much. What follows is an honest account of the six phases that got us there.

01
Market Research
Studied luxury fashion DTC leaders (COS, Arket, The Row) for visual language patterns. Identified the "editorial first, transaction-second" hierarchy as the defining characteristic.
02
Brand Positioning
Defined MAISON ORÉ as "considered luxury" — not heritage luxury (expensive), not fast luxury (trendy), but deliberate luxury (lasting). Every design decision references this position.
03
Typography System
Selected Fraunces (serif) for display and Hanken Grotesk for body — a combination that reads simultaneously editorial, modern, and considered. Avoided decorative weights in favour of structural contrast.
04
Art Direction
Developed the visual vocabulary: brass accent, bone palette, film grain texture, environmental photography over studio photography. Each choice references the physical quality of the garments.
05
Layout Architecture
We tested a product grid layout in the collections section — it converted the page into a catalogue immediately and lost the editorial register. Scrapped after one review. The final layout uses a strict editorial grid: no card grids, no carousel defaults, each section given room to breathe. The client initially pushed for a horizontal product scroller on mobile; we held our position and the data from usability testing supported it.
06
Performance, Accessibility & Build
Implemented in clean HTML and CSS with progressive image loading and minimal JavaScript — sub-2-second load on 3G. All colour pairings were checked against WCAG AA standards; the bone-on-dark combinations required adjustment from the initial art direction to pass contrast requirements without losing the warm tone. Copywriting, Midjourney art direction sessions, and content strategy were collaborative across the project team — the brief was genuinely a team effort, not a solo hand-off.
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