D2C eCommerce | Premium Fashion | UX Strategy | Design Systems | Conversion Optimisation
MGG is a premium ski-wear brand with over 10 years in the market. Having built a loyal customer base around performance and sport, they wanted to shift their positioning toward a more premium, fashion-focused audience with knitwear as the hero product category. The challenge was making that transition without alienating existing customers.
I was the sole designer on this project, responsible for everything from initial discovery and data analysis through to creative direction, UX strategy, design system build and delivery.
Post-launch the site delivered gross sales growth of 34% (CHF 68.8K) and orders up 31%, with mobile sessions leading at 30% growth. Beyond the initial launch, continued post-launch optimisation work around reviews and stock visibility drove further conversion improvements, with Add to Cart actions up 6% and product page conversion up 1.55% from targeted UX iterations.
The project started with a full audit of the existing site and available assets. One immediate constraint was that new photography was not due until several months into the project, meaning we had to design with placeholder assets and ensure every layout decision was future-proofed for the final imagery. Getting image ratios and dimensions right at this stage was critical.
The audit also uncovered opportunities beyond the core UX brief: SEO improvements, GDPR compliance gaps and WCAG accessibility issues all needed addressing as part of the redesign. The site also needed to support a flexible landing page builder for social campaigns and seasonal events.
Existing analytics gave us a clear picture of who the audience were and how they behaved on the site. A strong majority of users were on mobile, yet the site had not been designed with that in mind. Most homepage content was being ignored entirely, and session data showed users getting lost in navigation dropdowns, making U-turns and landing on pages that had nothing to do with what they were looking for.
The core audience age range was 35 to 55, which meant the new experience needed to be straightforward and frictionless. This age group are less forgiving of confusing navigation and complex flows, so simplicity was not just a design preference, it was a functional requirement.
The IA work had an added layer of complexity: the site was moving to Shopify, which brought its own constraints around collection nesting and landing page builders. We had to restructure the navigation in a way that made sense for users while also working within what the platform could support.
The core shift was repositioning Women's apparel as the primary focus of the site, with a simplified structure that reduced the number of steps between landing and product. We developed three navigation concepts and tested each one as a low-fidelity prototype with 10 customers, asking them to find specific products and collections. The winning structure was the one that consistently got people where they needed to go with the least friction.
The brief for this project was not to stand out from the crowd but to fit comfortably within it. MGG was not trying to be a young, trend-led fashion brand. The goal was to look and feel like the premium, considered fashion brands that their target audience already trusted and shopped with.
We reviewed 15 fashion brands with similar audience profiles, looking at how they used layout, whitespace, typography and imagery to communicate quality and simplicity. These became the reference points for defining the MGG visual direction.