Case Studies5 min read20 April 2024

Building a Luxury Candle Brand's Shopify Store

Jamie Chen

Lead Developer

We designed and built a bespoke Shopify store for a luxury candle brand launching into retail, achieving a 4.8% conversion rate and a 94 PageSpeed score at launch.

A luxury candle brand was launching their direct-to-consumer channel after two years of wholesale supply to boutique hotels and spa retailers. Their products had exceptional positioning — hand-poured, single-wick, using sustainably sourced botanicals — but they had no website. They came to us with a brand identity, a product range of 18 SKUs, and a launch date 10 weeks away.

The Brief

The brand's aesthetic was considered, minimal, and premium. They'd been featured in three national lifestyle publications and their wholesale buyers included names that carried serious weight. The digital experience needed to match that credibility. Fast, beautiful, and conversion-optimised — without the heavy-handed upsell feel that cheapens premium e-commerce.

Design Approach

We chose Shopify's Dawn theme as a base for its performance characteristics, then rebuilt the front-end entirely to the brand's design system. Key decisions included a full-bleed hero with no text overlay (letting the product photography speak), a fragrance note visualisation on each product page, and a gift-first navigation pattern that surfaced sets and gift bundles prominently.

Custom product page template with fragrance note anatomy diagram
Sticky add-to-cart bar with scent name and burn time visible
Gift builder section allowing custom set curation
Editorial lookbook section for hotel and spa lifestyle imagery
Minimal header with fragrance category mega-nav

Performance as a Design Constraint

Premium sites often sacrifice speed for visual ambition. We made performance a hard constraint from day one: all product imagery compressed to WebP under 150KB, no third-party font loading (custom typefaces served from Shopify CDN), and JavaScript deferred entirely below the fold. The result was a PageSpeed score of 94 on desktop and 91 on mobile at launch.

Gift-Focused UX

Candles are a gift purchase for a significant proportion of buyers. We added a gift message field at checkout, a premium gift wrapping upsell at £4.95 (converting at 34% of orders), and a 'for whom are you shopping?' quiz on the homepage that guided users to the right product based on recipient and occasion.

Key insightThe site launched on time, converted at 4.8% in its first 30 days, and gift wrapping was added to over a third of all orders.