Redesign proposal
Ninety-three years of craft, and a shop that hides it.
Orox has something almost no store online can buy: four generations of leather makers, from a baseball team in Oaxaca in 1933 to a workshop in Portland today. This is a review of what the website does with that, and what it could do instead.
Every page of the live store was opened at desktop and phone size in a scripted browser, and every number in this proposal was measured rather than estimated — page heights, header heights, how far down a phone screen the buy button sits, how many requests a product page makes, what the store’s own catalogue endpoints say about its collections. Five other leather stores were measured the same way on the same day.
The store is in better shape than most of its size. The photography is genuinely good, the buy area is well built, the reviews are real and the colour contrast passes everywhere. What it is losing, it is losing to structure: a catalogue split across duplicate collections, a buy shortcut that does not work on desktop, and a family history that never appears on the homepage.
What is in this proposal
Four numbers to start with
Collections
97
Published collections for 103 published products — very nearly one collection each
Duplicate names
25
Collections sharing a name with another live collection, across 11 name groups
Desktop header
217px
Announcement bar plus logo band plus category row, on a 900px screen
Add to cart
2,439px
How far down the phone product page the in-page buy button sits — 2.9 screens