how
La Botte Gardiane
was transformed
without compromising
their brand or values
from this
Hermès-grade leather, a NY Times & Vogue feature — but a website customers couldn't use without help over the phone
Before
When they reached out to rework their online store, La Botte Gardiane (or LBG, for short) was already a brand worthy of its accolades. The quality craftsmanship of the product, the in-store experience and all physical touchpoints reflected genuine expertise and history.
The online store did not.
For about 8 years, they did what they could using a pre-made template, but it felt cheap and outdated: mismatched with both the quality of the products and the care that went into every pair they produced. The brand was massively undersold, with a genuinely large gap between reality and how they were being presented online.
They wanted to grow their brand's legacy, but bringing new customers in felt too risky due to the large disconnect between what the site communicated and what the brand had already become.
The home page was a list of products with no context, showing nothing about their know-how, no mention of their heritage or the thought behind the business. A customer walking into the physical store would really feel the brand and leave a new or even bigger fan. A customer landing on the site just wouldn't.
The product page undersold the shoes by a long shot. One simple picture, no lifestyle shots, a color selector showing leather names instead of colors, very little detail, fully text-based, no real context on their sustainable process and materials.
Shoe customization was a central revenue stream to the business. In person, it worked beautifully: staff measured customers' feet, showed leather swatches, walked through every option. The human touch handled everything.
Online, that human touch was gone. Customers had to purchase a separate "personalization" product with their shoes, take their own measurements, and select options with no visual connection to what they were actually customizing. The flow was fragmented, confusing, and anxiety-inducing for anyone who hadn't been through it before.
The result: support tickets, abandoned orders, and the LBG team literally calling people one by one to guide them from using the site to customizing the shoes all the way to checkout.
The site lived on an older infrastructure that over the years turned into a bloated, disorganized inventory with a high operational overhead. Hundreds of archived products, unnecessary data and a site that got harder to maintain.
They were feeling burned out.
What I did
Before any design work, I dove deep into LBG's universe with the owners. The goals were clear:
bring in new customers to the online store
support their strategic decision to position as a high-end durable fashion piece
reduce friction for online customizations
optimize operations as much as possible to support their growth
So I got to work:
Expanding their brand identity and visual language as I redesigned the entire website from scratch
Using the website as the platform to express the brand's universe and wow every new and existing customer, I reimagined the La Botte Gardiane world to create an impactful experience that made their positioning clear immediately. The weight of their heritage became obvious on every part of the website, with beautiful videos and photography, now much easier to navigate and understand, supporting their price point and savoir-faire. The humanity behind the brand were now front and center, products could now be seen on people's feet, the deep care of each choice LBG made when producing them was now proudly showcased, and they could now shine as much as they did offline, but now 24/7 for the entire world to see.
Completely revamping the customization experience from the ground up
The customization experience had special attention: after digging into it with the LBG team, mapping every possible customization combination, every point where a customer could get lost or give up. The goal wasn't to make it look better. It was to bring the experience as close as possible to what only existed in-store: a guided, human conversation that made choosing feel easy, not intimidating.
From that mapping, I designed two distinct customization flows: One built around a 3D configurator, and a second one to be used as the first was being developed. The new designs felt more inviting, clearer and less intimidating. They guided customers through every step, bringing the experience as close as possible to the human touch that only existed in-person before.
After creating a custom design for the 3D configurator, I coordinated the entire build of the interface with the Emersya team (developer of the 3D configurator solution). The 3D experience was crafted to be as visual and immersive as possible, making people feel like part of the process and allowing them to get excited about what they could create with LBG.
Reworking the information architecture for the site and reorganized the product catalog
Mapping out everything that needed to be migrated from the old store. All the messy and unstructured data became a clean, easy to understand and manage database inside Shopify's super simple to use dashboard. What a relief!
Finally, I developed the custom Shopify theme, matching the prototypes pixel by pixel
This is where a lot of projects fall flat, so it had to be done meticulously. So as the final step, I brought it all to life, to the place where customers would actually interact with the brand.
After delivery, custom video tutorials were recorded so the whole LBG team could work on the site autonomously without relying on developers or any external party.
The results
The new store launched in late 2022. From 2023 onwards, the numbers tell a clear story:
Revenue grew 34.3%, going from €475K to €638K over the first three years
YoY revenue has been growing consistently
2023 → 2024: +10.1%
2024 → 2025: +21.9%
YoY total orders growth
2023 → 2024: +3.1%
2024 → 2025: +16.8%
orders per year rose from 2,039 to 2,456
AOV climbed 11.5% → from €233 to €260
returning customer rate grew from 30% to 34.8%
Revenue per session: from €1.40 in 2023 to €4.07 in 2025 (peak of €6.68 in 2024)
The customization side of the business grew faster than everything else:
a revenue growth of 163%, going from €51.7K to €135.7K → a 159% increase over three years
a growth of 121% in customized units sold
represented 11% of store revenue in 2023, grew to more than 21% by 2025 → doubling their share in two years
The quality of those purchases matters as much as the volume: order return rate on customized products held between 2.3% and 2.4% across all three years, against a store-wide average of 9–13%
Across 128 customizable products, 84% have returning buyers
Average returning customer rate on customized products is 46.8% — roughly 1.5× the store average
Business impact
Once they had the newly designed store in place, LBG could finally focus on growing the business instead of managing the consequences of a site that wasn't working
They could finally send new customer traffic to the site, eager to see how they would respond, and they did:
“ (...) we received many spontaneous compliments about our new website design: it managed to convey the artisanal side of our company from the homepage across the entire site (...) “ — Antoine Agulhon, CEO of La Botte Gardiane
LBG could now proudly share their site with new partners, when featured on TV or other press, knowing it would cement their hefty heritage even more solidly in people's minds.
They've been enjoying healthy growth year after year, captivating new customers and letting their deep passion and craft shine for as many people as possible, letting the website do the talking, without having to push for anything.
As of 2026, they've also opened their third physical store in Arles — urban capital of the Camargue region in the south of France.
Behind the scenes, Shopify made the store easy to edit and maintain, even with a fully custom theme. The team no longer needed technical help for day-to-day operations: adding products, updating content, managing the catalog became tasks anyone on the team could handle. And when they had any questions, all they had to do was refer to the video tutorials instead of needing training from a few people on the team who had all the knowledge.
The customization flow stopped being a liability. What once required staff to manually guide customers to checkout by phone now runs on its own. That's hours recovered every week, and a customer experience that scales without adding headcount.
With the brand finally presented at the level it deserved online, LBG could pursue growth with confidence — bringing new customers in without the risk of the site undermining the first impression. The gap between what the brand was and what the site communicated was closed. What the physical store had always done for customers, the website has now been doing for the entire world, 24/7.
case study
#1
+34.3% revenue over the first three years: the flagship overhaul that took a 60-year-old French footwear maison past €500k/year online
Hermès-grade leather, a NY Times & Vogue feature — but a website customers couldn't use without help over the phone
what I worked on
strategy
Shopify migration
information architecture
design
development
how
La Botte Gardiane
went
from this
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