It’s never been more important for young designers to have strong e-commerce sites, and those that succeed will have an enormous opportunity for growth at a critical survival point.
“AI and misinformation have us questioning everything, consumer trust in the quality of product [has eroded], and e-commerce wholesalers are no longer a reliable partner,” says Tony Wang, former brand strategy director at Ssense, who founded consulting firm and venture fund Office of Applied Strategy in 2020. “Laying the foundations for a successful DTC business should be young designers’ top priority right now.”
Several brands that come to Wang have released exciting collaborations with larger brands and enjoyed viral moments on social media that create a lot of impressions and drive traffic to their stores, but they’re struggling with conversion. “Where young designers don’t have the cash to invest in real estate or get a physical store, they must focus on e-commerce, but then customers don’t have the ability to touch and feel the product,” Wang says. “So e-commerce sites have become all about: how do you design for credibility in a 2025 environment where trust in brands is at an all-time low?”
Thanks to developments in AI and other commerce tech, best practices have shifted from when many designer brands likely set up their online stores in the past two decades. Getting it right will require investment, but returns are clear.
Jamie Davidson, who previously built LN-CC’s e-commerce site before founding his web design agency Dazze studio, tells Vogue Business that Dazze’s recent redesign and development of bespoke jewellery brand Bentley Skinner’s website has led to a 154 per cent total sales increase in the last 10 months, compared to the previous year. Meanwhile, Bita Shahian, the founder of e-commerce web design agency Exhibea, says that the company’s work on lifestyle and activewear label Sporty Rich’s website led to an 18.9 per cent increase in conversion and 7 per cent rise in revenue per customer over the last two years.
Figure out your platform
Brands must first decide whether to build their site in-house or work with an external agency, and then choose the platform they’ll use. Where luxury conglomerates have larger budgets and their own in-house web design teams, most experts advise individual brands to partner with an agency.
“Most designers aren’t too tech savvy, but they have a clear vision of what they want,” says Dazze’s Davidson. “Beyond building the website, agencies also tend to have a network of copywriters and photographers to tap into if they need to improve those different assets for online too, and can extend to other online projects like email marketing if needed. ”
Most agencies then have a preferred platform for designing brand sites, based on slightly different levels of customisation.
The majority choose to build on Shopify, which is conducive to e-commerce sites because it offers an integrated checkout. Shahian says Shopify makes sense for emerging designers because it’s relatively affordable. It also comes with several integrated tools that allow brands to invest in things like re-targeting, where they can track where customers have maybe looked at an item but abandoned cart, and re-target them through ads or emails to keep their brand top of mind for the consumer, which can help increase conversion.
Others, however, prefer to build on sites that are more customisable, like Wordpress, which has an open-source e-commerce plugin called WooCommerce. Adobe Commerce (previously called Magento) is the platform favoured by larger brands and conglomerates for the customisation it supports, but this typically requires an in-house web developer whose job is to maintain the site. Wix is touted for being easy to use if smaller brands are looking to get started on their own before later enlisting a design agency. And for brands with quite simple website needs, Squarespace is recommended for its straightforward interface and sleek design credentials, with the option to upgrade to add payment gateways to create an e-commerce store.
The most expensive upfront option is to build a bespoke site and partner with agencies for elements of the site design — an option web designers say is usually reserved for larger brands with in-house developers. And if brands have too few designs to warrant a whole site, but want to move beyond social media and dip their toes into selling through a DTC storefront, a handful of smaller multi-brand marketplaces have been established in the last few years that offer brands an alternative to larger wholesale retailers.
One such platform is APOC, an online indie designer marketplace founded by Ying Suen and Jules Volleberg five years ago, that is many young brands’ first stockist. APOC allows fledgling brands to join the platform if they have a few designs and want to work on a made-to-order basis, rather than take the larger financial risk of setting up their own DTC site before confirming consumer demand. Suen and Volleberg took a hybrid approach to designing their e-commerce site, choosing to build most of it in-house on Shopify’s platform. They then sometimes collaborate with specialists like Dazze studio for certain projects, like email marketing.
Utility first, storytelling second
While AI search engines are making inroads into online shopping, larger luxury brands are currently redesigning their DTC sites to function like experiential online flagships. But experts say that for smaller emerging brands looking to drive conversions, less is more, and they should start by focusing on the site’s functional design.
Wang suggests that brands steer clear of a homepage with elaborate videos and other storytelling experiments, and instead cut straight to the chase with product listing pages from the moment the customer lands on the site.
An investor in the virtual try-on startup Doji, Wang recently worked with Peter Do on the site for his new line, PD-168, and integrated Doji’s AI-generated avatars into the product page assets to represent products on humans while bypassing the need for extensive model shoots. Wang also designed the PD-168 homepage to appear as a product listing page (PLP) the moment customers land on the site — a move he says is intended to increase conversion and purchase intent.
“The user journey should be accessible, straightforward and transactional,” he says. “Once you’ve built that, you can then layer on more stylistic elements, but you can’t start from branded style and then try and add on utility and function.”
Succinct product descriptions that describe materials used, product function and contextual use will help the site improve its SEO and AIO. Shahian says elements as simple as font size have a huge impact on conversion, as does the fundamental concept of loading time.
“Some web agencies will introduce a lot of motion and animation, but actually, this really hurts conversion. The most important thing is having a really fast website,” she says, advising brands to ask agencies how they approach loading time before choosing them. “It’s quality over quantity when it comes to multimedia elements. Exercise restraint and test different versions to try and cut loading time down. But beautiful visual design still helps — customers are discerning, they’re looking at websites all day long.”
Shahian points to smaller investments that can yield big ROI for a brand’s online visual identity, like designing custom fonts and choosing great photographers for featured images.
One big benefit of an e-commerce site over bricks-and-mortar is that brands can experiment more with A/B testing than they could experiment within a physical context — something all the web designers Vogue Business speaks to encourage brands to embrace. Testing different headlines on product description pages, different lengths of product descriptions, and contextual information about a product s uses are all details that brands can refine and update to improve conversion as they go along.
Nailing product imagery is also key. Experts say it needn’t be elaborate, but the key is consistency in style across the site.
“You can, of course, style the images and use them as a way to encode some level of brand — I’d say the best brand play for Ssense was the e-comm images — but they should be cost-effective and easy to scale and replicate as you add more products to the site,” Wang says.
APOC has increased site conversion over time by making site imagery more consistent and improving product labelling, which its founders say has also helped reduce returns and build trust.
Like Wang, they emphasise the value of restraint when it comes to design.
“The site should communicate identity instantly, look cohesive and feel easy to explore,” they say. “We try to balance a clean UX with a sense of editorial storytelling, and our design language is restrained so each designer’s work can speak for itself.”
Perhaps the most important piece of advice for young designers is that a brand’s website isn’t the only online consumer touchpoint. Wang encourages brands to think of their e-commerce strategy holistically and to think about other channels like social media for larger brand storytelling opportunities.
“I think a lot of young designers try to put too much editorial content on their website, but ultimately, by the time you re on an emerging brand’s website, the customer generally knows what the brand’s about and they re just trying to shop. The designers who crack how to make that easy for them are going to see real growth and traction.”
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