A new vertical, built to not look like its competitors.
PromoDash is a 0 to 1 e-commerce build for a vertical Group Bayport is starting. The brief was explicit: do not land where every competitor has landed. That is a research problem before it is a design one, because you can't out-position a market you haven't mapped.
Two poles, no middle. Giants have the catalogue and clunky, rep-heavy buying. Modern shops have the UX and premium pricing on fragile stock.
Nothing delivered scale and simplicity together, so the positioning wrote itself: transaction-first, self-serve, curated rather than comprehensive, sample-before-you-buy, 3–5 day shipping. Nothing was designed until the market, competitor, user and technical research was done.
Cross-sell off the PDP
Moved to a dedicated Design Preview page, with two logic-driven rows instead of one generic “related products”: one by decoration compatibility, auto-compositing the buyer’s own artwork onto other products, and one by use-case tag, e.g. “completes your onboarding kit”.
Cart is a page, never a drawer
A $200–500 multi-item, multi-size order needs room to be checked. A drawer optimises for speed on a purchase nobody is making in a hurry.
Mixed sizes in one cart line
Found broken in a live reference flow and rebuilt as its own behavioural pattern, generalised across apparel (S–XL) and drinkware (12–32oz). A genuinely different input mode, not a copied pattern.
Placeholder-labelled claims
Print-quality and shipping-date numbers stay explicitly labelled as placeholders in the design until operations confirms them. Polish that lies is worse than an unfinished screen.
The project is mid-build, so there are no results to report. Print-quality and shipping-date claims are placeholder-labelled inside the product too, pending real operational confirmation. Honesty over polish, in the work and in the write-up.