Building a Shopify store for JFenzi

A fragrant Shopify store that became JFenzi's first step towards D2C sales.

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SCOPE OF WORK

Pre-project analysis
UI / UX support
Development
Shopify
Maintenance and SLA

JFenzi is a Polish producer of fragrance cosmetics with an established market position and a strong retail presence through a network of drugstores. When the project started, the brand ran no B2C activity of its own – so building an online store was not only the beginning of online sales, but the brand’s first step towards selling direct to consumers (D2C) at all.

Key project goals and challenges

Analysis of business needs and user behaviour
Information architecture design
Building the site on Shopify
Enabling the brand to move into D2C sales

From communication strategy to online sales

The store was to be built in a new visual convention – consistent with the recently designed communication strategy – and in line with modern trends that answer the needs of people shopping online.

The project called not only for technical delivery, but also for educating the client in e-commerce basics and agreeing realistic assumptions for the launch together. In practice that meant managing expectations, prioritising, and reducing the risk of overloading the store with functionality right at the start.

The store as a foundation for D2C growth

From the outset the store was not designed as a tool for maximising sales immediately. The client was clear that the priorities were:

building brand awareness and a direct relationship with the customer,
testing D2C,
growing capability within the client’s own team.

At the planning stage we agreed together that the store was to serve as a foundation for D2C growth, not as a source of “sales results from day one”. That fed into a deliberate prioritisation of “must have” versus “nice to have” and a staged approach.

UX and aesthetics across a large fragrance catalogue

The biggest challenge was building an online store for a client that had never run its own B2C retail. That meant designing the entire buying process from scratch and preparing the client’s organisation for a new channel, operationally and procedurally.

Another significant design challenge was reconciling aesthetic requirements with legibility and usability. The store had to be elegant, light and timeless, yet it could not “visually compete” with the product. Added complexity came from the fact that the products in the catalogue did not share a fully consistent aesthetic (different bottles, labels and styles), so the store design had to minimise any sense of visual clutter and impose order.

Building the store step by step

The scope covered end-to-end delivery of an online store on the Shopify platform, including:

analysis of the client’s business needs and advice on choosing a platform,
selecting and customising a Shopify theme,
designing the store structure and product cards,
configuring payments, shipping and checkout,
implementing features that make choosing a fragrance online easier (including descriptions, fragrance notes and an inspiration system),
preparing the store for launch and providing rollout support.

Adapting the materials to the realities of e-commerce

A significant content thread also emerged during the project. Some materials had to be produced from scratch – the photographs the client had were suited to catalogues and print, but not to e-commerce. As a result, the agency’s remit grew to include a product photoshoot, which unified the look of the catalogue in the store and improved the consistency of product presentation online. The intention was for the store and its design to act as a “backdrop”, leaving the leading role to the products.

Key technology and functional decisions

One of the key decisions was to use Shopify as a solution that is:

quick to launch,
intuitive to work with,
easy for the client to maintain and develop.

The scope of custom work was deliberately limited in favour of stability, ease of use and the client’s ability to grow the store independently. At the same time we made sure the way products are presented suits the specifics of the perfume category – so that users can make a buying decision online on the basis of clear descriptions and fragrance information.

The first results after launch

In the first months after launch the store began producing measurable signals confirming that the chosen strategy was sound. Even though sales were not the main goal of the project, the platform started completing transactions and building quality traffic.

The best-converting channel proved to be high purchase-intent sources such as Google, which confirmed that the store structure, checkout and buying journey were right. Social media channels, TikTok among them, worked mainly on image and supported brand awareness, in line with the marketing strategy.

Those results confirmed that the store had been designed as a stable base, ready for further optimisation, for D2C growth in both sales and marketing.

Preparing the team to run the store themselves

Once the build was complete, the client’s team was trained in using the Shopify admin. Being able to manage products, content and basic store processes without ongoing developer support mattered a great deal to the client, so the project kept that in view from the very beginning..

“Working with the IVN agency on the launch of the perfumyjfenzi.pl online store is an example of complete professionalism.”

The store was handed over to us as a finished product, ready to go live without a hitch. Both the technical side and the content stage went exemplarily and very smoothly, and to the schedule we had planned.