When your users know more about the product than you do, what do you design? A luxury multi-brand watch platform backed by one of India's largest conglomerates — where the challenge wasn't building features, it was earning the trust of collectors who can spot a fake spec from a mile away.
Context
This luxury multi-brand watch platform is backed by one of India's largest conglomerates — a curated platform for serious collectors and aspirational buyers in India. The watches being sold aren't commodity purchases. They're considered, researched, often decade-long aspirations. The users who come to Mythika have read every review, watched every YouTube breakdown, and know the movement finishing on a reference they're considering better than most watchmakers.
Designing for that user is humbling and clarifying in equal measure. The interface can't fake depth. A vague product description, a blurry image, a spec that's one number off — and the trust is gone. At the same time, Mythika was Tata's flagship foray into luxury digital retail, which meant the brand needed the platform to feel unmistakably elevated from the first pixel.
"The brief wasn't 'make it look premium.' It was 'make collectors feel like this platform understands watches the way they do.'"
The name Mythika draws from mythology — Greek, Roman, a touch of the ancient — expressed through an orange-gold palette with gothic undertones and editorial weight. Every design decision ran through one filter: does this feel like something that belongs next to a Patek, an IWC, a Vacheron?
Most ecommerce PLPs are about giving the user everything at once — filters, sort options, price badges, rating stars, promotional labels — all competing for attention. For watches at this price point, that approach is antithetical to the product. A Rolex Submariner doesn't need a "Best Seller" badge next to it. It needs space.
The Mythika PLP is a 3-column grid of big, clean images. Each card carries only the essentials: brand name, collection, watch name. Price is there — but it's not the hierarchy lead. The image is. The watchlist button sits quietly in the corner. There's no noise.
The PLP hero doesn't show a grid. It shows one highlighted watch from a collection — front and centre, elevated, as if seen under glass on a velvet cushion in the physical store. Other watches from the collection sit on either side. The user can browse through the collection directly in the hero, changing which watch is highlighted. It's browsing that feels like discovery, not a dropdown.
The traditional ecommerce filter — price range, material, brand — is all there. But for watch collectors, the hierarchy of navigation is different. They think in collections and references. The Mythika filter architecture reflects that: brand → collection → series. Finding a specific reference from a specific year of production is as natural as filtering by colour.
Mid-scroll on the PLP, instead of another row of product thumbnails, the page surfaces a movement education section: "Looking for a particular movement?" — followed by illustrated options: Automatic, Manual, Solar, Quartz. Tapping one filters the grid below. The education isn't a separate section hidden away in FAQs. It's woven into the browsing experience, where it's actually useful.
Mythika's primary goal is footfall — getting people into the physical store, where the real experience (and the sale) happens. The PLP reflects this: no lazy loading, page-wise navigation that feels considered rather than infinite. The final section of every page is "Book Your Experience at the Store" — a simple appointment booking flow that turns browsers into visitors.
Movement education — filter as you learn:
Wound by movement of the wrist
Hand-wound, the original complication
Light-powered, precision quartz
Battery-driven, supremely accurate
Traditional product detail pages front-load the transaction: big price, add-to-cart button above the fold, specs in a table below. That architecture is optimised for a consumer who's already decided. Watch collectors haven't decided — they're in a process of being convinced, which can take weeks.
The Mythika PDP is designed as a journey. It earns the watch before it sells it. Visuals lead; specs follow — and when specs arrive, they're contextualised by the movement, the heritage, the craft that makes those numbers meaningful.
The PDP opens with the watch in full — no distractions. A short editorial paragraph about the movement and what makes it significant is placed alongside the primary image. Not specs. A sentence: "The Calibre 3235 self-winding movement achieves a power reserve of approximately 70 hours. It is one of the most regulated movements in the world." That's the difference between a spec and a story.
Detailed, focused shots of the case, the dial texture, the clasp, the crown — each with a short annotation that appears on tap. The watch collector who wants to understand the finishing on the lugs can do so. The first-time buyer who wants to see how beautiful it looks in natural light can do that too. Same screen, different depths of engagement.
An interactive anatomy section where the user can tap on any part of the watch to understand it: the bezel, the crown, the case back, the bracelet, the crystal. Each element reveals a short explanation and a close-up image. It was designed for the collector who already knows — but appreciates that the brand knows too.
Instead of a generic review section (anyone can write a review), we built a curated section of impressions from real watch collectors — identified by their persona. A diver's watch shows a quote from a diving enthusiast. A dress watch shows a quote from a business collector. A sports chronograph shows a motorsport personality's perspective. The user sees the voice most relevant to them.
Just before the "Explore other watches" section (the natural exit from the PDP), we placed short-form content: a 90-second video about the watch's history, a "how to authenticate" guide for this model, a look at how it performs against its key competitors. The goal was to intercept the exit intent and replace "I'll think about it" with "let me book a store visit."
The purchase CTA on Mythika doesn't say "Add to Cart." It says "Experience at Store." Clicking it surfaces a store appointment booking flow: select location (Mumbai or Delhi), select date, select a specialist — optional: add notes about what you're looking for. The entire digital journey is designed to end in a human interaction, because that's where the watch is, and where the sale actually happens.
"What Sets It Apart" — collector perspectives, matched to persona:
"The 300m water resistance isn't marketing — I've worn mine at 40 metres and it performed flawlessly. The uni-directional bezel is the safest design choice in watchmaking."
"What keeps me coming back to this reference is the dial texture. Under natural light it does something no photograph can capture. The vertical brushed finish catches the sun differently every hour."
"I wanted something that worked in a boardroom and at a wedding. This does both. The case diameter is exactly right for a formal shirt cuff and the bracelet taper is elegant without being ornate."
Key Decisions
We removed the price from the primary card view. This was a deliberate and debated decision. The argument for: at this price point, the buyer has already decided they're in range. Showing a number before they've connected emotionally with the object is distracting. The argument against: transparency. We landed on price available on hover/tap on the card — present, accessible, but not competing with the watch. The logic held up when we looked at how the actual stores merchandise: the price tag is rarely face-up.
Luxury doesn't feel infinite. Infinite scroll is a pattern that says "there's always more." For Mythika, the curation is part of the value proposition. We designed page-wise navigation — clear pages of 9 watches (3×3 grid), with a deliberate next-page action. Each page is a curated set, not a data feed. This also meant every editorial section within the PLP (movement education, expert help, articles) appeared at a consistent scroll position rather than being lost in an infinite stream.
Taking inspiration from the materiality of the watches themselves — the satisfying click of a pushpiece, the resistance of a winding crown — all interactive elements on Mythika were designed with depth: subtle shadows, a slight 3D quality that makes them look and feel tappable. The orange-gold primary color with shadow depth made CTAs feel like they had physical weight. For a product that users fantasise about touching, this mattered.
Unlike mono-brand watch sites (Rolex, IWC) that control every image, Mythika is multi-brand — which means the images come from different brand teams with different art direction, different lighting setups, different angles. We couldn't control the assets. So we designed the system to work with heterogeneous photography: consistent background treatment on the PLP cards, a product isolation layer that normalises scale across brands, and PDP editorial sections that provide our own visual context around whatever the brand supplies.
Outcomes
The platform received sign-off from the client's leadership and is moving into development. The "What Sets It Apart" section and the education-as-filtering mechanic on the PLP were called out specifically in the review as differentiators that no other luxury ecommerce platform in India was doing. The "Experience at Store" CTA was adopted as the primary conversion point across all Mythika touchpoints — a direct translation of the insight that for watches at this price, the sale is made in person.
Confidential Work
Mythika is the most visually ambitious project in my portfolio. The full case study includes the complete design system, every key screen, the watch anatomy interaction, and the full "What Sets It Apart" collector system — all of which I'm happy to walk through in a conversation.
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