The brief

Discovery: no way to browse by identity or mood, only by craft medium
PDP urgency: zero conversion signals on product pages, no social proof, no scarcity cues
SEO infrastructure: no structured data, no collection descriptions, no schema markup of any kind
Artisan attribution: vendor names buried in the backend, invisible to customers on the storefront
Homepage: default theme layout with no brand voice, no personality, no reason to stay

The build ran across 6 phases from November 2025 through February 2026. Phase one established the Reformation theme base and SEO infrastructure: collection-schema.liquid, faq-schema.liquid, breadcrumb-schema.liquid, and meta templates for every page type. Phase two rebuilt the About Us experience with custom CS Brand Story and CS Our Team sections. The full theme overhaul followed in January 2026, replacing the default homepage with kc-personality-categories.liquid, kc-origin-story.liquid, kc-collection-scroll.liquid, and a countdown banner. The PDP received a complete CRO layer: a live view counter with realistic Indian traffic simulation, three-tier stock urgency tied to live Shopify inventory, sticky add-to-cart, Judge.me review integration at teal #108474, and expandable side panels for shipping, returns, and care. The vendor directory came next, a kc-vendor-list.liquid page rendering all 56 artisans A-Z with links to their collections. The build closed with the full kc- section library and a custom footer redesign.

Three months post-launch: 82,000 Google Search Console impressions. Every page type carries structured data. Every collection has a keyword-targeted description. The SEO work is in the markup, not a plugin.

One thing we'd do differently: SEO infrastructure should have been phase one, not phase two. The schema and meta templates were built in December after the theme setup, which meant the first weeks of crawling had no structured data. It cost nothing to fix, but it was the wrong order.