Shopnest
Project Story
Shopnest sells practical homeware to people furnishing their first homes, and its catalogue had outgrown its website. What began as a forty-product store had become four thousand products squeezed into a design built for a boutique. Search was unreliable, categories contradicted each other, and checkout leaked at every step. OpenNeux was asked to redesign the store and its design system, without interrupting a business that could not afford a quiet month.
We started by living in the data: search logs, support tickets, and session recordings from the busiest trading weeks. The pattern was consistent. Customers arrived with a specific item in mind, failed to find it two different ways, and left for a competitor whose site was uglier but faster. The redesign treated findability as the brand experience: a new taxonomy, a serious search, and product pages that answer sizing and delivery questions immediately, ahead of any visual refresh.
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Problem
The catalogue structure had grown organically for years, so the same kettle could live in three categories with three different names. Filters reset without warning, product photos varied wildly in style and size, and delivery information appeared only in checkout, where it surprised people into abandoning carts. On mobile, which produced most traffic and least revenue, category pages were unusable walls of small text and smaller targets.
Behind the storefront, the operations were straining too. The merchandising team published products through a spreadsheet ritual that took days, imagery was resized by hand, and every promotional banner required a developer. Campaigns therefore ran late or not at all, and the design debt compounded: three checkout versions existed across devices, each with its own bugs and its own analytics blind spots. Customer service absorbed the cost, answering the same questions about sizing, stock, and delivery that the website should have answered. Shopnest's brand promise was 'everything for your first home, without the headache', yet the website had become the headache. The business did not need a prettier store. It needed a store organised the way customers think, run on tools the team could actually operate, and measured by the only scoreboard that matters in retail: completed orders per visit.
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Solution
We rebuilt the catalogue around how people furnish rooms, not how warehouses store stock. Categories were consolidated from over ninety to thirty, with one vocabulary shared by search, filters, and navigation. The new search handles the misspellings and synonyms real customers type, and product pages lead with the decision-critical facts: dimensions, materials, stock, and a delivery date stated before the buy button, not after it.
The second half of the work was operational. We designed a component system covering the full store, so the merchandising team assembles pages from approved parts instead of requesting development time. Publishing a product dropped from days to under an hour. Checkout was unified into one responsive flow with guest purchase and honest totals from the first step. Within a quarter of launch, mobile conversion had climbed by a third, and 'where is my size' tickets had nearly vanished.
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