Bringing an established wellness brand online in India: a buying journey that had to respect a style guide it did not get to write.
To develop an online presence and buying journey, while respecting the existing style guide for Holland and Barrett.
The brand already existed, and it was not mine to reinvent. The job was everything around it: how someone arrives, finds a product, understands it and buys it, all inside a visual language that was already set.
The experience had to help people buy, and understand what they were buying.
Holland & Barrett was new to India, awareness was low, and the customers ranged widely in age. A shop alone would have asked people to already know what they wanted.
Use the patterns they have already learned: a search field where they expect one, filters on the left, a basket at top right. Learnability is mostly a matter of not being novel.
Give the catalogue a second door. Someone who knows they sleep badly should not have to work out which supplement to search for.
Twelve routes in, named after problems rather than products: cold and immune support, pain relief, sleep, vision.
The same catalogue, indexed the other way: vitamins, minerals, supplements, herbal and licensed remedies.
Neither route is buried behind the other, so the menu never asks which kind of shopper you are.
This one screen is most of the argument. A supplements catalogue is hard to search precisely because the person searching often can’t name the thing they need, so the navigation carries a second index, by condition, sitting level with the first.
The green, the wordmark, the product photography and the tone were fixed. What was open was structure: what a row of products has to tell you before you click, how far a promotion can go before it crowds the catalogue, and where the brand should be loud versus quiet. The brand stayed put; the shop got built around it.
The Health Hub sits in the main navigation, not in a footer. Sixty-four articles (recipes, seasonal skincare, immunity, sleep) indexed by the same conditions the shop is indexed by, so reading about something and buying it are two steps of one thing rather than two different visits.
India was a mobile market and the brand was new to it. The phone was not a reduced version of the desktop site. It was where most of the first impressions were going to happen.
The mega-menu's two indexes collapse into a single drawer without losing either one.
Filter and sort stay reachable above the grid instead of moving off-screen.
The basket and its running subtotal follow, so the commitment is always visible.
The published project lists the areas I worked across. It was self-directed, alongside social media managers and stakeholders, so the brand, the experience and the interface were one continuous piece of work rather than a brief handed down in stages.
A good shop doesn’t only help people buy. It helps them work out what they need.
Which is the same problem as the other two: someone arrives without the vocabulary the system expects, and the design either closes that gap or leaves them to it.