The opportunity

The goal was to create a digital home for a growing pottery brand that felt personal, warm, and handcrafted while functioning like a modern, scalable commerce platform. This was not just about building a polished small business website. It was about building a system that could grow with the brand.

The challenge

Pottery businesses have a unique rhythm. Products are often one of a kind or made in small batches. Collections shift seasonally. Events and markets are an important discovery channel. And over time, knowledge about glazes, clay bodies, firing outcomes, and piece variations becomes part of the business’s long-term value.

The challenge was to create an experience that felt simple and elegant for customers while remaining structured, flexible, and easy to manage behind the scenes. The experience needed to:

• Present the work with beauty and clarity
• Support ecommerce across multiple categories and seasonal collections
• Create a flexible system for products, events, and editorial content
• Work cleanly across desktop and mobile
• Provide stronger operational support behind the scenes

My role

I led the end-to-end creative and system development of the platform, including:

• UX and information architecture
• Visual design direction
• Webflow build and reusable component structure
• CMS architecture
• Ecommerce product presentation
• Content strategy for key pages
• Design of a custom internal pottery journal

The solution

I designed and built Alania Crafts as a modular, CMS-driven ecommerce and content platform that balances handcrafted personality with long-term usability. The front end was designed to feel calm, tactile, and personal, using large imagery, restrained typography, and clean spacing that keeps the work at the center. Key experience layers include:

• A homepage that introduces the current seasonal collection and guides users into shopping
• Category-based browsing across mugs, bowls, vases, jars, platters, and more
• Individual product pages with photography, descriptions, care instructions, specs, and purchase paths
• Event pages that support in-person markets and discovery
• A blog that gives the brand an editorial voice
• An Our Story section that connects the work to a broader shared creative life

CMS and system design

A major goal was to reduce one-off page building and make the platform easier to maintain over time. I structured the site around reusable components and CMS-driven content models, allowing the business to:

• Add and manage products more efficiently
  
• Organize content by category rather than manual layout
  
• Update seasonal collection messaging without redesigning pages
  
• Support blog posts and event listings through repeatable patterns
  
• Maintain consistency as the site grows