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Ecommerce · Brand-led

Ecommerce UX designer for brand-led stores.

Available now · 1 slot open

Most ecommerce templates are built for catalog stores with infinite SKUs and discount-driven funnels. If you're selling something hand-made, low-SKU, one-of-one, or brand-led — the standard template language actively undercuts what makes your product worth buying. I designed Painted Juttay end-to-end around that exact problem.

Hire me as a freelance ecommerce designer if your store is closer to a craft gallery than a fast-fashion site — and you need the product page, the IA, and the checkout to read that way without breaking the patterns shoppers already trust.

See Painted Juttay case study
The template problem

Why most ecommerce templates fail brand-led stores.

Standard ecommerce IA assumes you have infinite SKUs and a discount-driven funnel. It gives you men / women / sale at the top, attribute filters down the left (size, colour, brand, price), and a grid of identical thumbnails as the dominant unit. That works beautifully if you're selling ten of one t-shirt. It collapses if you're selling one of one anything.

The first thing a brand-led, low-SKU store has to do is reject the grid as the default browsing unit. When every item is unique, “colour filter” doesn't mean what it does at Zara — every piece has many colours, and the arrangement of those colours is the product. Categories collapse, filters lose their grip, and you end up shipping a UI that fights the brand for attention.

The second thing is the funnel. Template ecommerce assumes the buyer is price-sensitive and time-pressured: countdown timers, “selling fast” copy, panic-red badges, cart abandonment popups. For a hand-painted product or a considered-craft purchase, that language doesn't accelerate the sale — it undercuts the positioning. You can't ask people to slow down and look at a small piece of art, then scream “BUY NOW” at them in red.

And the third thing is the visual system. Default Shopify and WooCommerce themes are theme-able, not derivable — you swap a logo and a few colours on top of a generic chrome. For a brand whose entire pitch is that the product is one-of-one, the surface has to feel of the product, not stamped on top of it. That's a design problem, not a theming one — and it's the one I scope for as brand-led ecommerce design.

Where the work goes

What I focus on in ecommerce UX.

  • Brand-led product pages

    The painting (or the product) fills the column before any UI does. No countdown timers, no "selling fast" pressure copy, no faux-scarcity badges — stock-of-one or stock-of-few is its own scarcity signal. The page trusts the viewer to read it.

  • One-of-one and limited-SKU IA

    When every item is unique, category filters collapse and attribute filters lose their grip. I replace the generic men/women/sale grid with a gallery surface — filter by palette mood (warm / cool / earthy / monochrome), motif, or size, not by brand or category.

  • Checkout flows that respect the price tag

    Hand-painted, hand-made, or considered-craft products are not impulse purchases. Checkout has to feel trustworthy, not transactional — care notes, painter notes, and shipping reassurance carried through to the otherwise-boring screens.

  • A visual system pulled from the product

    Colour tokens, type pairings, and component shapes derived from the product itself — recurring motifs, surface texture, silhouette — so every screen feels of the brand rather than stamped on top of it. Defensible origins for every token.

How it works

Four steps to shipped.

  1. Discovery call

    30-min free call. We figure out if we're a fit and what the engagement looks like.

  2. Fixed-scope proposal

    Within 48h, you get a written scope with timeline and price. No hourly billing.

  3. Kickoff + 6-phase build

    Research → Wireframes → Visual → Test → Handoff. Weekly Loom, async Figma.

  4. Handoff + 2 weeks Q&A

    Dev specs, animation specs, 2 weeks in your engineering Slack.

See the full 6-phase process
Featured case study

Painted Juttay — palette mood, not colour filter.

End-to-end ecommerce design for Painted Juttay — a Karachi label that sells juttis painted by hand, one pair at a time. The brief was honest from day one: how do you sell a one-of-one painted object inside a template language built to sell ten of one t-shirt?

The IA decision I'm proudest of: replacing the standard colour filter with a palette mood filter (warm / cool / earthy / monochrome). Shoppers can't filter on “the specific colourway of this pair” — but they can filter on taste. That single move changed the shop from “find your size and pattern” to “find your taste”.

Read the case study
Solo
End-to-end UI/UX designer
Gallery
IA — not a catalog grid
Stock: 1
Scarcity in plain language
Brand-derived
Visual system from the juttis
Pricing

How to work together on ecommerce.

Three engagements — a single-surface Sprint (product page, checkout), a Full Project for an end-to-end brand-led store, or a Retainer for ongoing drops and iteration.

  • D
    1–2 weeks

    Design Sprint

    Quick win, ship in 2 weeks.

    $450

    A focused engagement to fix a specific flow, audit an existing product, or design a single feature end-to-end.

    • 1–2 weeks of focused design time
    • 1 specific flow OR a heuristic audit
    • Hi-fi screens for desktop + mobile
    • Interactive Figma prototype
    • Async Loom walkthrough at delivery
    • 1 round of revisions
    Best forFounders who need a specific thing done well, fast — landing page, onboarding flow, settings redesign, or an audit before raising.
  • Most chosen
    F
    4–8 weeks

    Full Project

    End-to-end, research to handoff.

    $800–$1,200

    The full engagement — user research, wireframes, hi-fi screens, prototype, usability testing, and developer handoff.

    • Discovery interviews + research synthesis
    • Wireframes for every flow
    • Hi-fi design (iOS + Android OR desktop + mobile)
    • Design system + reusable components
    • 5-person moderated usability test
    • Interactive prototype + walkthrough
    • Dev handoff specs + 2-week Q&A office hours
    • Up to 3 rounds of revisions
    Best forFounders shipping v1 or doing a serious v2 redesign. The work that needs to feel right, not just look right.
  • M
    Rolling, 2-month min

    Monthly Retainer

    Ongoing design partner.

    $500/mo

    Reserved hours every month for ongoing design work — new features, iteration, system maintenance, async reviews.

    • 40 reserved design hours / month
    • Weekly 30-min sync
    • Async Figma + Slack throughout
    • Design-system governance + extensions
    • Roll-over up to 8 hours / month
    • Priority response (< 24h on weekdays)
    Best forFunded startups (seed to Series B) with a roadmap that needs a consistent design hand — and a founder who values speed over RFP processes.

Full pricing breakdown, side-by-side comparison, and add-ons live on the pricing page.

Recent projects.

See all case studies
10+
Products Shipped
4+ Years
UI/UX Experience
5
Industries Designed For
4+
Countries Served
Services

What else I design.

Ecommerce-specific questions.

  • All three. Most brand-led, low-SKU stores I work with land on Shopify because it has the strongest checkout primitives and the cleanest API for custom themes — so as a Shopify UX designer freelance engagement, I scope the design to fit those primitives (Liquid sections, product / collection / cart routes, the Shopify checkout extensibility surface) rather than fighting them. WooCommerce and headless custom builds get the same treatment: design to the platform's native flows, override the parts that hurt the brand, leave the rest alone.

  • I design it end-to-end — IA, homepage, product page, cart, checkout, visual system — and hand off Figma files plus a written spec your developer can build from. On Painted Juttay, I worked with the founder Muzammil and the build team in parallel: I shipped Figma, they shipped the storefront. I'm not the engineer for a Shopify theme build, but I've handed off to enough of them to write a brief that won't bounce.

  • Inverted from a catalog store. With one-of-one or limited-SKU positioning, the standard ecomm IA (grid of identical thumbnails, attribute filters, sale category) actively undercuts the brand — it reads as a discount store. I replace it with a gallery-style surface: every item is its own card, filters work on taste (palette mood, motif, vibe) rather than spec, and "one pair available" lives in plain language instead of as a panic-red banner. Painted Juttay is the worked example of this pattern.

  • I work with what you have, and I'll be honest about what your photos are doing for the design. Brand-led ecommerce design depends on the photography more than any other ecomm category — a beautifully-designed product page with average shots will underperform a basic page with great shots every time. If the shots aren't carrying their weight I'll flag it early, write a shot list for what the design actually needs, and either pair you with a photographer or let your team run it.

  • Three differences that drive almost every screen decision. First, scarcity is the dominant constraint — stock = 1 — so the product page reads more like a gallery label than a configurator. Second, the buyer is shopping for taste, not for a SKU — so filters work on motif and palette mood, not size and price. Third, the price tag is usually higher per-unit — so the checkout has to feel trustworthy rather than transactional, with the same care and texture as the rest of the site.

  • I treat it as part of the brand surface, not as a template moment. Most stores carry the brand through the homepage and product page and then drop it the second you hit cart — generic system fonts, default Shopify chrome, zero texture. For a craft brand that breaks the trust signal you spent the rest of the site building. I keep the type pairing, the colour tokens, and the trust signals (care notes, painter notes, shipping reassurance) carried into the cart and checkout — within whatever the platform actually lets you customise.

Related

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Available now · 1 slot open

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Based in
Karachi, PakistanUTC+5