Eastern Botanics — UI/UX case study.
An ecommerce storefront for a natural beauty brand built on East Asian herbs — the browse, the product story, and the buy.
- Client
- Eastern Botanics
- Role
- UI/UX and visual design
- Sector
- Commerce — beauty & personal care
- Surface
- Storefront, product detail, checkout entry
Context
Eastern Botanics sells natural beauty products built on East Asian herbal ingredients. In a category crowded with near-identical claims, the ingredient story is the differentiator — and it has to survive contact with a shopping flow.
The design problem is the tension every beauty storefront has: enough storytelling to justify the price, little enough friction to actually convert.
What the design had to do
Carry the ingredient story
The herbs are the reason to buy. They need room without turning every page into an essay.
Make browsing effortless
Category, product and comparison paths that hold up on a phone.
Reduce the distance to buy
Every extra decision between interest and cart is a leak.
Replace this with the brief in Eastern Botanics’s own words, plus the one constraint that shaped the most decisions — timeline, tech, compliance, an existing design system, or a stakeholder. This is the part a hiring manager reads first.
Process
A conversion problem dressed as a storytelling one. Every step below had to keep resolving the same argument: how much ingredient story earns its place before it starts costing sales.
Understand
A brand whose entire differentiator is its herbal ingredients, competing against a shelf of near-identical claims.
Research
Audit the category — what the comparison set looks like, and where ingredient storytelling actually changes a purchase decision rather than just filling space.
Wireframe
Settle the product page split between story and spec, and decide what survives when that page is 375px wide.
Visual design
A palette and type system that carries the botanical origin without tipping into apothecary cliché.
Prototype
Walk browse → product → cart end to end, then remove every step that isn’t earning its place.
Handoff & support
Product templates the team can populate for new SKUs without needing a designer.
The steps above describe what each stage had to solve on Eastern Botanics. What turns that into a case study is the evidence — add, for any two or three of them:
- Who you spoke to, and the one finding that changed the design
- A decision you made, and the option you rejected
- Something that tested badly, and what you did about it
- A wireframe or screen — before and after beats a finished shot
Outcome
Retail is the easiest place on this site to prove design worked, because the funnel is already instrumented.
Add-to-cart rate on the redesigned product page
Product page → checkout conversion, split by device
Mobile checkout completion — where beauty storefronts usually leak
Average order value, if the ingredient story is doing its job
Put real figures against the four above, or strike the ones you can’t evidence. If Eastern Botanics never shared numbers, a single sentence from the client about what changed is still worth more than a blank. Right now no project on the site states an outcome, and that is the biggest gap in the portfolio.
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