A bespoke commerce experience for a contemporary fashion brand

Ellery & colette is a contemporary fashion label with a strong, opinionated brand voice. The off-the-shelf storefront they had been running on did not let the brand breathe — every collection drop felt like a wrestling match with theme constraints, and the team spent more time on workarounds than on storytelling. They wanted a digital experience that read like an editorial, not a template.

The Challenge

Bespoke commerce is risky in both directions. Build it too custom and the team needs an engineer for every collection launch; build it too generic and you've reinvented the theme you were trying to escape. The real work is in deciding what is template, what is content the team owns end-to-end, and what is deliberately hand-crafted per drop.

Performance was the other constraint. Image-heavy editorial pages are the slowest part of a fashion site, and the brand depended on imagery that did the product justice — there was no version of this where the team would accept lower-resolution photography to shave milliseconds.

Our Approach

We split the site into three layers. A bespoke editorial layer — landing, lookbook, collection narratives — built as composable sections the team can rearrange. A standardised product layer — grids, product pages, cart, checkout — built once and reused across every drop. And a headless content layer that lets the team launch a new collection without writing code, without a developer in the loop.

Performance was budgeted from day one rather than bolted on later. Images are served as responsive WebP/AVIF, lazy-loaded below the fold, and routed through a CDN; critical CSS is inlined; the editorial layer is rendered as static HTML at build time. The product surfaces stay dynamic, the heaviest pages do not have to be.

What We Built

Frontend

React, TypeScript, SCSS Modules, static rendering for editorial

CMS

Headless CMS for editorial and collections

Commerce

Shopify Storefront API (cart, checkout, inventory)

Images

Responsive WebP/AVIF, lazy-loaded, CDN-served

Infrastructure

Edge-deployed static + dynamic split, GitHub Actions

Observability

Sentry, Vercel Analytics, Lighthouse CI in pipeline

Results

The brand team launches new collections without engineering involvement. Editorial pages, lookbooks and collection narratives are composed in the CMS; product grids, product pages and checkout are the same components used everywhere else on the site. A collection that previously took a coordinated sprint between brand and engineering now lands in an afternoon.

On the technical side, editorial pages — historically the slowest part of a fashion site — load in under two seconds on mobile, with the heaviest collection drops still hitting their performance budget. Lighthouse thresholds are enforced in CI, so a regression on image weight or JavaScript bundle size fails the pull request before it merges.

The team understood our brand vision immediately and translated it into a digital experience that our customers love. The attention to detail and responsiveness made all the difference.

— Ellena colette, Founder, Ellery & colette

Splitting the site into a bespoke editorial layer and a standardised commerce layer kept the engineering scope contained while giving the brand team end-to-end control over how each collection lands. Twelve weeks was the right shape for that scope — short enough to ship before the next drop, long enough to do the editorial layer properly.