Joanna Czech
Luxury Reimagined
Joanna Czech is a legend in skincare. Clients book with her in advance and stay on a waitlist. She keeps the practice small by choice—there are only so many hours in a day, and only her two hands. Fifty minutes, one face, full attention. People look noticeably better after.
Her website was the one part of the business that didn't match. Grayscale, stock photos, prices and a button. It sold bottles and said nothing about why anyone wanted them. Her treatment room is warm and personal. The website was neither.
I rebuilt the storefront and voice around it so the site could speak about skincare the way Joanna does.
Three years of work. Revenue went from $300K to $5M. By the end the website matched her treatment room.
Identity
Point. Line. Plane.
I built the whole identity on three simple ideas: point, line, and plane. A photo has one clear focal point. Type lines up on a grid. And there's always plenty of open space around everything. It's basic stuff, honestly, but naming it that plainly helped the whole team stay consistent without me weighing in on every little decision.
Point
Line
Plane
The premier product
The Facial Massager, packaged for retail.
The Facial Massager is the studio's flagship product, a single piece of polished steel that feels expensive the second you pick it up. The packaging had to live up to it. It needed to feel like a luxury on the shelf without a lot of decoration doing the talking.
So: a white box, simple type, the Joanna Czech mark small at the bottom. Inside, the roller sits on a black-and-white striped tray, a little like a watch in its case. You open it and you're looking at the massager, not the packaging. It's the same point-line-plane thinking as the website, just in something you can hold.
Outcome
From $300K to $5M in three years.
Year one, revenue roughly tripled. The redesigned product pages did most of that.
Year two we leaned all the way into editorial: long, photo-driven pages and no banner sales. People started coming back to buy again.
By year three it mostly ran on its own. Joanna's team handled most of the updates without us.
The website started out as marketing for the salon. By the end it was where most people met the brand in the first place.
"We rebuilt the storefront and the brand caught up. Suddenly the site was the marketing. Every page sold the next."
Storefront
Editorial as Commerce
We brought on a former magazine editor to rewrite the product pages. Joanna sat with her for the first batch and just talked, the way she actually describes each product to a client. Once that voice was on the page, we stopped having to fight for conversion.
We dropped the plain white product shots. The new photos show the products in use, close on hands and skin and light.
Where it made sense, the writing went first person, so a recommendation from Joanna actually sounded like her.
Two ways through the catalog: discover (browse) and routine (build). The routine builder turned individual products into morning and evening sets a customer could check out in two clicks.
Every product page gave you something worth reading before it asked you to buy. Usually just a few honest lines.
Mobile
Phone first. For real.
Beauty buyers are on their phones. We designed every page that way: cropping for portrait first, scaling up to desktop after. Most pages on the site never get viewed on a 1440px display, so we stopped optimizing for one.
Touch targets sized for a thumb. Forms that fit on one screen.
Photography cropped for the phone first. Letterboxing on tall screens disappeared.
Performance budget under 1.5 seconds to interactive on LTE. The team held it.
The cart was rewritten so most checkouts finished without a keyboard.
CzechList
The editorial sub-brand.
The store sold the products. CzechList sold Joanna. We launched it alongside the storefront so she'd have somewhere to talk in her own voice: five sections called Skin Science, Tips of the Trade, Czech Mate, Joanna Loves, and Ask Joanna. The hand-drawn "Ask Joanna" mark gave that one its own handwriting, a nice human touch in a brand otherwise built on the clean C-monogram and tracked caps.
The brand was always there in person; it just hadn't made it onto the website yet. The part I love in this kind of work is getting someone's actual voice onto the page without flattening it. Once the site started sounding like Joanna instead of a generic store, people took to it the way they always had to her.
Takeaways
- Joanna Czech
- Beauty
- Lifestyle
- Ecommerce
- Creative Direction
- Design Production
- Content Strategy
- Project Management
- Process Consultation
- UX/UI Design
- Product Strategy
- Content Strategy
- Joanna Czech (Founder)
- Anne Howrey (Project Manager)
- Efstathios Maroulis (Development Lead)
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