Canvas Home is a chic Manhattan-based homeware company. When the company decided to expand its reach into the UK and European markets in 2015, I was approached by the UK partner to design and build a website. It needed to be consistent with the US Shopify site, but with a sympathetic refresh, suitable for the new markets.

With the first iteration of the site, there was no requirement to sell online. Instead, the emphasis was on communicating the brand effectively to consumers: brand story, values and ethics, and its partnerships with ceramicists and other artists.

Then a few years later in 2018, Canvas decided to launch a consumer facing website on the Shopify platform, allowing customers in the UK and Europe to buy direct.

Since the budget was limited, we decided to choose an existing Shopify theme (Brooklyn) which I then heavily customised, creating more appropriate layouts for a large inventory and a look and feel which was more similar to the first WordPress site I created. I also set up the store so it initially used product data imported from the US store, but I wanted to use larger imagery, so I resized all the hires catalogue photography ready for Canvas staff to upload to product pages.

The client is now managing all aspects of the website themselves.