✨ Intro Statement
I built and continue to develop the Shopify store for a Swiss haute couture brand based in Geneva, featuring custom-made womenswear designs from an independent Swiss designer. The site is built on Shopify's Prestige theme and split across two production models — ready-to-wear pieces and made-to-order fabric selections — which needed to feel like one seamless, editorial collection rather than two different systems bolted together.
📄 Project Brief
The brand sells two distinct types of pieces on the same French-language storefront: création disponible (ready-to-wear, in-stock creations) and fabriqué à la commande (made-to-order, built from a chosen fabric). The brief was to give both product types the same premium fabric-swatch experience — Prestige's native variant picker handles the made-to-order fabric options, while a custom block was built for the ready-to-wear side, and the two needed to be visually indistinguishable to the customer.
🎯 Goals & Strategy Overview The goal was to unify two different production models into one coherent, editorial shopping experience, without hiding the real difference between a piece that ships now and one made to order.
Main Goals:
Unify the Fabric Picker – Make the native made-to-order variant picker and the custom ready-to-wear swatch block visually identical.
Build Native, Not App-Based – Implement everything at the theme level, editing shared Prestige components rather than adding third-party swatch apps.
Design for a French-Language, Editorial Audience – Keep the storefront's tone and layout consistent with a Swiss luxury clientele.
Support Ongoing Iteration – Keep the codebase easy to refine as the brand's team requests new adjustments.
🔍 Project Review One Look, Two Ways to Buy The trickiest part of this project wasn't the design, it was the mismatch hiding underneath it. Ready-to-wear fabric options were shown through a custom block; made-to-order fabric options were shown through Prestige's own native variant picker, a completely different component with its own default styling. Rather than layer on more custom work, I traced both components back to the shared theme CSS and fixed the styling at that level, so every fabric picker across the store now shares the same rounded swatches, the same persistent border on the selected fabric, and the same always-visible fabric name.
🔧 Project Development Breakdown Building and Refining a Two-Track Store
Phase 1: Store Foundation
Set up the Shopify store on the Prestige theme for a French-language, Swiss luxury audience.
Structured the catalog around the two product tracks: création disponible and fabriqué à la commande.
Phase 2: Custom Fabric Swatches
Built a custom fabric-swatch block for the ready-to-wear line: rounded square swatches, a thick persistent border on the current selection, and the fabric name always visible as text.
Verified the styling across multiple product pages to keep it consistent piece to piece.
Phase 3: Native Swatch Unification
Traced the made-to-order fabric picker back to Prestige's shared native variant-picker CSS rather than rebuilding it as a separate custom component.
Updated that shared style site-wide, so every native fabric picker on every product now matches the custom block exactly.
Phase 4: Ongoing Refinement
Added flexible homepage section support, including an optional title image alongside the text-based hero.
Continued iterating on theme copies as the brand's own requests evolved, keeping live and in-progress versions clearly separated.
📈 Project Outcome A single, coherent fabric-shopping experience across two production models. By fixing the mismatch at the shared CSS level instead of patching each product individually, the brand now presents every fabric choice with the same premium visual language, whether the piece is in stock today or being made to order. The theme keeps evolving alongside the brand as new sections and requests come in.
📊 Key Stats (Exact performance metrics pending; the store is a live, ongoing project)
2 product tracks unified under one visual system
1 shared CSS fix applied site-wide instead of per-product patches
0 third-party swatch apps used
Swiss French-language luxury storefront
✅ Key Results
Delivered a custom Fabric Swatch Block for ready-to-wear products, with rounded swatches and a persistent selection border.
Unified that same look into Prestige's native variant picker for made-to-order pieces, fixed at the shared CSS level.
Built the storefront natively on Prestige, with zero third-party swatch apps.
Added flexible homepage title image support alongside the text-based hero.
Kept the codebase structured for continued, iterative collaboration with the brand's team.
💼 Business Impact For a luxury brand selling both ready-to-wear and made-to-order pieces, a mismatched fabric picker quietly undermines trust right at the moment a customer is deciding on a higher-ticket, custom garment. By fixing that inconsistency at the theme level rather than papering over it, the brand presents both product tracks as one confident, premium collection, and the underlying codebase stays simple enough to keep evolving as its own design requests come in.