Project partnership
with NFBS Paris
Results
after redesign
La Botte Gardiane (LBG) is a French brand handcrafting boots since 1958. Sold in over 50 countries and using high-end leather from the same tannery as Hermès, they've earned recognition as a French Living Heritage Company and been featured in The New York Times, Vogue, and Elle.
Despite their reputation, their website was holding them back: their website was so hard to navigate they had to call customers to help them place an order.
I partnered with them to redesign their store on Shopify from the ground up, helping them cross €1M in total annual revenue, turning a frustrating customer experience into one that keeps them coming back, finally matching the brand LBG had already become.
what I worked on
strategy
Shopify migration
information architecture
design
development
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, in-store experience and all physical touch points reflected genuine expertise and history.
The online store did not.
For 8 years, a pre-made template did the job… barely. It felt cheap, outdated, and massively undersold the brand. New customers landing on the site simply wouldn't feel what walking into a boutique felt like.
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.
Before any design work, I dove deep into LBG's universe with the owners. The goals were clear:
grow online sales and 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.
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.
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.
I started by 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.
The navigation structure was completely re-thought, based on purchasing patterns and LBG's new goals, making sure to order everything in a way that made sense.
From account creation to login, forgot password flow, to customer dashboard for viewing orders history, payment info, addresses, etc, I redesigned all the pages to ensure a seamless branded experience when a customer interacted with their LBG account.
This is where a lot of projects fall flat, which is why it had to be done meticulously. So as the final step, I brought it all to life by building a custom theme based on all the screens previously created.
Carefully crafted to make sure to the place where customers would interact with the brand actually matched my vision at the very start of the project.
— antoine agulhon, CEO of LBG
Total annual revenue in 2025
Increase in online orders per year
Increase in AOV
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.
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.
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.
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©hippo design • 2026