La N’atelier was about things made with care.
So we felt the brand and the webshop deserved the same care.
Together with Nathalie we built a brand identity and Shopify webshop that didn’t just show the handmade character of La N’atelier, but made you feel it.
From handmade to digital
Nathalie’s problem wasn’t that she didn’t know what she liked.
Quite the opposite.
La N’atelier already had a world of its own: personal, feminine, refined and above all made with great attention to detail.
The challenge was somewhere else.
How do you translate that into a brand and webshop without losing the character along the way?
Because selling a handmade product from a standard digital environment felt rather contradictory to us.
The brand first.
Before we started on Shopify, we had to get clear on how the world of La N’atelier should look and feel digitally.
So together with Nathalie we developed the Brand Style Guide.
Not to have a nice document that then disappears into a folder somewhere.
But to be able to make choices.
And above all: how all of those together become recognisably La N’atelier.
The products were handmade.
So the brand deserved some attention too.
Then the webshop.
With that brand foundation we could take the next step: Shopify.
The challenge was to bring together two things that are often set against each other:
character and ease of use.
The webshop had to capture the world of La N’atelier, while still making it easy for customers to discover, choose and order.
So no design for design’s sake.
And no generic webshop that happened to have beautiful products in it.
A digital environment where the brand and buying the product became part of the same experience.
Beautiful isn’t enough.
Underneath that visual layer, it obviously had to work as well.
So we looked beyond the front end of Shopify.
We optimised the webshop and brought together several parts of the operation.
So that everything behind an order increasingly fitted together logically.
The customer doesn’t need to notice any of it.
Nathalie does.
Good commerce should feel simple.Even when it isn’t.
We weren’t done after launch.
After the first three months the foundation was in place.
But as with almost every webshop, you only find out after launch how people actually use it.
So we kept working together after that.
- We optimised the webshop further.
- We were a sounding board on marketing.
- We worked on social media.
- We helped with automation and with building out the e-commerce environment.
Not because something new had to be invented every month.
But because a webshop isn’t suddenly finished once it goes live.
Launch. Learn. Improve.
Our role
Some partnerships end.
And that’s okay.
Our monthly partnership ended in early 2024.
And La N’atelier itself no longer exists.
Nathalie eventually decided to close the business.
That doesn’t make the work we did together any less relevant.
If anything, this case shows us something else.
- Not every brand has to become the next multinational.
- Not every partnership has to go on forever.
- And not every success story has to end with a chart disappearing off the top right of the screen.
For a while, we helped Nathalie translate her ideas into a brand, a webshop and a digital foundation she could take forward on her own.
That was what the business needed at the time.
And we’re still proud of it.
Craft deserves craft.
La N’atelier started with someone who made beautiful things with her hands.
Our role was to make sure the digital world around it was built with the same care.
The product was handmade.The thinking behind it was too.
