Case Overview
A Social-First Website Experience for a Beauty & Skincare Brand
A fivefold increase in footfall and purchases after redesigning the site as an extension of the brand’s social feeds.
INDUSTRY
Retail cosmetics — makeup & skincare
SERVICE PROVIDED
Brand & Digital Experience Strategy · Customer-First Website Design
ENGAGEMENT TYPE
Website experience redesign with social commerce integration
THE CHALLENGE
A fast-growing makeup and skincare brand had built a genuinely engaged social audience on Instagram and TikTok. The problem was what happened next: when that same excited audience clicked through to the brand’s website, they landed somewhere entirely disconnected from what had drawn them in — product grids, static imagery, standard category navigation, with no trace of the personality or visual energy that had made the social content work. Strong social engagement wasn’t translating into proportionate site traffic, and marketing and ecommerce functioned as separate disciplines with separate KPIs, meaning nobody owned the handoff between a customer’s social discovery moment and their website experience.
THE APPROACH
Rather than a conventional ecommerce redesign, the engagement started with a simple reframe: the website needed to be designed as the next step in a social journey, not as a destination in its own right. That meant mapping the actual paths customers were taking from specific pieces of Instagram and TikTok content through to purchase, and identifying exactly where those paths broke down. Design work centred on integrating live Instagram and TikTok feeds directly into the shopping experience — woven into product pages, category browsing and the homepage — so shoppable content sat alongside traditional product information. Navigation and visual merchandising were reworked to match the tone and pacing of the brand’s social content, and checkout and product-discovery flows were simplified in parallel.
THE OUTCOME
Footfall — both to the site itself and, in turn, into physical retail locations — increased fivefold following the relaunch. Purchases rose by the same multiple, reflecting not just more visitors but a meaningfully improved conversion experience. The brand gained a much clearer, more measurable line between social content performance and commercial results, which changed how the marketing team planned and evaluated future campaigns. The website was repositioned internally from a cost-centre catalogue to a core part of the brand’s growth engine.
Our social content was already working — the website just wasn’t built to catch it. Now the two work as one experience, and the numbers show it.
