E-commerce · 2026
Forma
A small-run furniture brand that needed a storefront before it had a photography budget.
- Role
- Design system, front end, commerce layer
- Pages
- 19
- Signature system
- Faceted catalogue, variant pricing and persistent cart
The brief
Forma makes eight products in small runs. Product photography for eight objects in ten finishes is forty-plus shots and a studio day, and they had neither yet. The question was whether a storefront could be genuinely good without any photographs at all — not as a placeholder, but as the actual design.
Constraints
- No photography, and no stock imagery — nothing hotlinked, no licensing to clear.
- Filtering had to be shareable and survive the back button.
- The cart had to persist and not contradict itself across tabs.
- No payment details collected anywhere, at any point.
What we did
01
The objects are drawn
Each product is parametric SVG built from flat geometry, a hard contour and two tones taken from the selected finish. Choosing a finish re-renders the object rather than tinting an image — which is the honest version of a swatch, and incidentally makes every finish available on day one instead of after a reshoot.
02
Filters live in the URL
Facet state round-trips through the query string, so a filtered view is shareable and bookmarkable and the back button moves through filter states instead of leaving the page. Values within a facet are OR-ed and separate facets AND-ed — what shoppers expect, and the opposite of the naive implementation.
03
Filtering never blanks the page
The full catalogue is server-rendered; the client reorders and hides it rather than rebuilding. Crawlers see every product, the page works without scripting, and nothing flashes on a filter change.
04
Arithmetic that matches the real world
One pricing function serves the card, the product page and the cart. Tax is charged on goods plus shipping, which is how most US states work and the thing storefront demos routinely get wrong.
What it cost
Drawn objects communicate proportion, finish and form honestly, and communicate material texture not at all. For a brand selling the feel of oiled oak that is a real limitation — the recommendation is drawn art for the catalogue and photography for the detail pages once there is a budget for it.
Every project trades something away. A case study that does not say what is a brochure.
How it was checked
- Facet algebra, URL round-tripping, variant premium stacking and cross-tab cart sync driven in Chromium.
- Order totals asserted exactly: $225.00 subtotal, $20.66 tax, $263.66 total.
- Absence of payment fields asserted by inspecting form controls, not the marketing copy.