What does luxury feel like when it's not in the room with you? An iconic French department store was entering India from scratch. I led a team of 7 to design the entire digital experience — three surfaces, three pillars, zero prior precedent.
Context
the brand is not just a department store. In France, it's a cultural institution — the kind of place Parisians describe as a destination, not a shopping trip. When the brand decided to enter India, the brief wasn't "build us a website." It was closer to: make people in Mumbai and Delhi feel something before they ever walk through the doors.
There was no existing Indian digital presence. No user data to learn from. No design precedent to build on. We had the brand's global identity, a launch timeline, and a question nobody had answered yet: what does the brand mean to an Indian luxury consumer?
"The Indian luxury shopper is not Paris-curious. They're occasion-driven, brand-literate, and deeply skeptical of digital luxury that doesn't feel earned."
We structured the entire design effort around three pillars: the Shop (product discovery and commerce), the Service (the high-touch experiences that set this brand apart from any other luxury retailer), and the Experience (the editorial, seasonal, and event layer that makes this feel like the brand and not just another ecommerce platform).
Pillar I
Product discovery, PLP, PDP, checkout — the commerce engine. Designed for a luxury buyer who knows exactly what they want and needs to find it elegantly.
Pillar II
The differentiators — stylist booking, 3D gifting, valet integration. The digital layer that extends the in-store experience to before you arrive and after you leave.
Pillar III
Editorial, seasonal activations, events, and the "Sneak into Store" campaign windows that made the digital platform feel like this brand — not just a store's website.
The Shop
Standard ecommerce logic puts the product grid first. Browse, filter, buy. That's not how people shop at the brand — in person or online. In-store, you wander. You discover something because of where it's placed next to something else. A stylist points you toward a brand you hadn't heard of. You end up buying a bag you came in for and a scarf you didn't know you needed.
The Shop was designed to replicate that logic digitally. The homepage leads with editorial — curated stories, brand features, seasonal looks — before it ever shows a product grid. Categories are structured by mood and occasion alongside traditional brand/type navigation. The PDP doesn't just describe the product; it contextualises it — cross-brand styling, designer notes, and "pairs with" suggestions built into the product page itself.
The hierarchy was flipped from standard ecommerce: stories led, products followed. This meant building a content model alongside the commerce model — something most ecommerce platforms don't architect for. Every page type was designed to hold both narrative and transactional content without either feeling like an afterthought.
Indian luxury shopping is deeply occasion-driven — weddings, festivals, gifting seasons, milestone celebrations. We added an occasion-based entry point alongside traditional brand/category navigation so the site could meet users where their intent actually was, not where the brand's catalogue was organised.
Luxury products don't sell on specifications. They sell on feeling, story, and social proof. The PDP was designed to carry brand history, designer context, stylist endorsements, and curated "complete the look" suggestions — turning a product page into a conversation rather than a transaction.
The Service
the brand's in-store experience is defined by what you can't get anywhere else: a personal stylist who knows the stock, white-glove gifting, the ease of having your car taken care of so you can focus on the experience. Our job was to extend these touchpoints into the digital space — not as features bolted onto an ecommerce site, but as first-class experiences with their own flows.
A dedicated booking flow for in-store and virtual styling sessions with the brand's partner stylists. Users could browse stylist profiles, select by specialty (bridal, corporate, occasion-wear), and book time slots — with style preferences captured upfront so the session was productive from the first minute.
Gifting is a huge purchase occasion in Indian luxury. We built an interactive gifting journey that let users compose their gift — product selection, signature store packaging, personalised card, gift wrapping preview — with a 3D-informed visual that showed exactly what would arrive. This wasn't a dropdown. It was a dedicated gifting experience.
For in-store visits, the app carried the pre-arrival experience: valet parking pre-registration, store appointment confirmations, and a concierge chat for high-ticket visits. The boundary between digital and physical was intentionally blurred — the app made arriving at the store feel as considered as everything inside.
Checkout was designed with the same attention as the rest. High-value purchases triggered an optional concierge review step. Gift-wrapping, premium packaging, and delivery preferences were built into the flow — not hidden in settings.
The Experience
The Experience pillar was about everything that isn't commerce but makes the brand feel alive. The seasonal activations, the editorial voice, the events layer. This is where the most distinctly on-brand design work happened — and where I pushed hardest for ideas that had never been done by an Indian luxury retailer before.
"The brief for the seasonal campaigns was: the window displays at the Paris flagship stop people in the street. What's the digital equivalent?"
The store's Paris window displays are famous — they're events in themselves. We designed a digital campaign mechanic called "Sneak into Store" that translated this into interactive seasonal activations. Users could access a preview of upcoming in-store exclusives, limited drops, and window display reveals before public launch — creating genuine anticipation for physical visits.
We built a full editorial content model — lookbooks, designer profiles, brand histories, trend reports — as a proper content type in the system, not a blog. Every piece of editorial content was connected to shoppable items, but the articles stood on their own as genuine reading material. The editorial team used this architecture to plan seasonal content calendars.
The India events programme — brand launches, fashion previews, trunk shows, collector evenings — needed a digital home. We designed an events system with RSVP flows, exclusive access tiers for loyalty members, and post-event content that extended the experience beyond the room.
The third surface: interactive digital displays within the physical store. Product look-up kiosks, digital styling guides, event announcement boards. These were designed as part of the same system — consistent visual language, connected data — so the digital and physical felt like one experience, not two separate ones.
My Role
I led the design team of 7 across all three pillars. My role sat at the intersection of design leadership and hands-on craft — I defined the overall information architecture and experience framework, and personally took ownership of the flows that needed the most strategic thinking: the gifting journey, the stylist booking system, the editorial content model, and the seasonal campaign mechanic.
Outcomes
The design system built for this project became the foundation for all subsequent digital work — the editorial framework set the content strategy template for every seasonal campaign, and the Service pillar introduced service-layer design patterns that the brand hadn't operationalised digitally before.
More than the outputs, what this project demonstrated was the capacity to design at scale: coordinating a team across three surfaces, making architectural decisions that held up across 50+ screen types, and keeping the brand voice consistent when seven people are making design decisions simultaneously.
Confidential Work
This project is under NDA. I can walk you through the complete case study — all three pillars, every major screen, the design decisions and the thinking behind them — in a private conversation. Request a deck below.
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