When the founder of GAIA at DAWN approached me, their website was just a marketing sites. The problem? They want to expand it into ecommerce site.

“We need to scale this website into more functional to sell products,” they told me.

Despite having a professional photography and brand design, GAIA’s website can’t expand instantly.

The team needs to create seamless experience.

The marketing site lived on Framer, while the new e-commerce functionality would be built on Shopify.

The challenge? Creating a seamless experience that felt like one cohesive brand, despite living on two separate platforms.

Over three months, we crafted solutions to each challenge:

Created a smooth transition between the marketing and e-commerce URLs

Replaced entire product photos into sizeable images that focus on the product, so customer can see the value of the products

Developed a clear navigation system that works intuitively across both desktop and mobile

“We can’t keep our existing design on the site, but first let’s design the ecommerce platform first” GAIA team told me.

While the current design looked stunning at first glance, we had to take it off and re-designed the entire website.

However, this journey revealed several critical challenges:

Shopify's platform limitations clashed with some of our initial design ambitions

Category filtering needed significant simplification

The decision to build in 2 different platform was tricky because Framer and Shopify have different framework.

The true breakthrough came when we put the staging website in front of real users.

This wasn't just about collecting feedback - it was about watching real people interact with a fully functional system.

The insights were invaluable:

Users needed more specific descriptions for missions, categories, and collections

Mobile navigation between Framer and Shopify platforms felt disjointed

Product photography needed a complete rethink - users wanted to see products up close, styled like IKEA's practical approach

This project proved that successful e-commerce isn't just about building a shop - it's about creating a cohesive journey that makes sense to users, regardless of the technical complexity behind it.