Nicole

Nicole was one of Ukraines top multi-brand jewelry boutiques, a Kharkiv institution carrying Rolex, Hublot, Carrera y Carrera, Panerai, and other names that dont show up in ordinary stores. The boutique sat in the heart of the city, with clients ordering pieces from across the region.

This project is personal. As a kid from an ordinary family, I used to pass that storefront on public transport, looking at the Bentleys parked outside, and tell myself I would walk through those doors someday. Years later, building my own business, I went looking online for a piece of jewelry for my wife, and found Nicoles website still stuck in 2015. No mobile version. Empty product cards. So I decided to fix it.

A catalog, not a store

For luxury jewelry and watches, a website is not a store, it is a catalog. Nobody buys a Rolex by adding it to a cart and waiting for delivery. So instead of a typical ecommerce flow, we designed around the pieces themselves: clean imagery, smooth animation, subtle hover effects, and navigation simple enough to get out of the way.

We studied how the old site performed, analyzed user behavior, and built the new UX around how people actually browse for pieces like these, then layered in a proper SEO structure and warmed up the existing domain before launch.

The build itself was fully custom, JS/Next.js on the frontend, PHP and Laravel underneath. An earlier iteration ran on OpenCart, a CMS that does not get enough credit; for smaller, catalog-heavy projects like this one, it is genuinely a strong option.
Catalog

The numbers spoke for themselves:

  • Before the redesign: about 500 visitors per month, 2-3 calls
  • One month after launch: 2,800 visitors, 35 calls
  • Six months in: 15,000 visitors per month
  • Time on site grew from 30 seconds to 6 minutes 20 seconds
  • Indexed pages grew from 60 (mostly empty) to 3,500 fully populated product pages

Calls became a steady stream instead of a rarity.

After launch, we ran a full SEO pass, built out keyword structure, rewrote meta tags across the catalog, handled technical optimization, and moved the site to HTTPS. Over the following months we published guest content with backlinks to keep building authority.

Somewhere along the way, this stopped feeling like a typical agency-client relationship. The owners were happy enough with the results that they connected us with two of their brand partners, we went on to develop brand identity for Nico Juliany and Carrera y Carrera, both carried in the boutique. Even now, based in Seattle, we are still in touch, currently in talks about another large project together.

We were already in discussions with the owners about adding virtual try-on for the next phase when the war put everything on hold. Missiles hit the city center where the boutique stood, alongside the residential buildings around it. The site is offline today. We are hoping that when the war ends, Nicole reopens its doors and becomes the citys showcase again.

If your site does not match the quality of what you actually offer, that gap is costing you customers every day it stays unfixed. Get a Usability Audit