Each month, Designerly chooses a site with a stellar design to give our design award. We try to select ones from various industries and look at some basic user experience (UX) elements, such as navigation and mobile responsiveness, as well as what makes the site unique. For July, we chose Moshe Modern as our site of the month.
While we’ve looked at e-commerce sites in the past, this is the first quilting supply business we’ve considered. It’s a niche market but remains popular with all ages. The quilting market is worth approximately $35 billion per year, with about 98% of quilters identifying as female.
Quilters love crafts and creating things, so one thing we considered was the overall inventiveness of the design and if it embraced the target audience. Mashe Modern stood out from its competitors.
Winner: Mashe Modern
Kristen Lee decided to start Mashe Modern in 2016 after discovering a love for the craft of quilting and having trouble finding the modern-looking fabrics she preferred for her projects. She named the brand after the first initial of each of her five children’s names, coming up with “Mashe.” She talks about how she loves bright colors and patterns. The company has a storefront location in Dallas Center, Iowa. They also offer classes and retreats.
The company now offers a loyalty program, where shoppers can earn points on orders and apply the savings to future purchases. Your small business should take note of the way this one builds customer loyalty and repeat business. A rewards program is a wise way to retain customers.
Why We Chose Mashe Modern as the Winner
While there were many worthy sites selling fabrics, we chose Mashe Modern as our winner because they had a very specific niche. The brand owner isn’t trying to be everything to everyone–she just wants to sell modern fabrics to quilters like her.
When we first start vetting sites, we often cast a wide net across many industries. In this instance, we’d stumbled across their landing page and instantly knew we wanted to feature quilt supply shops as a niche market and to teach our readers how to design a site that attracts customers, even if you serve a small target audience or offer a very specific product.
You’ll learn a lot by studying Mashe Modern and the various design techniques they’ve used on their website. Here are a few of the things that made us choose them. You can apply these to your own small business design to drive users to convert into customers.
Working Carousel
People tend to love or hate carousels of images in a design. In the past, they could bog down browsers and make the entire experience come crashing down. However, with faster connectivity speeds, most users can view sliders fairly easily.
Things to keep in mind for your carousel:
- Limit the number of images
- Avoid auto-advance
- Make slide navigation intuitive
- Use a high enough resolution for crisp images
- Tie the images together with color, sizing or similar themes
A carousel is your opportunity to show off your personality without taking up too much space above the fold.
Excellent Navigation
Every site needs excellent navigation, or the user may grow frustrated and bounce away. Mashe Modern places their navigation as a sidebar on the left hand side of the page. They offer a link back to their home page and then 10 main categories, with a few subcategories under options like Shop and Sale.
On the mobile version, the site shrinks down to a hamburger menu. However, when you tap on it, it pops up as a sidebar on the same side, offering some consistency across device types.
Minimal Color Palette
The whole theme of the business is that they offer bold, bright fabrics with a modern edge. Rather than overwhelm users with bright pops of color in the site’s palette, they keep things very minimal to showcase the photos of the material.
When you land on the page, you see muted greens and earthy tones and a lot of whitespace. As you start to shop, the material adds vivid hues and pops of color for interest.
Modern Font
The typography of a website can make a strong first impression. The website designers chose a sans serif font to give the look a modern edge. When you look at the letters for the business name, you’ll notice there are no embellishments on the letters, keeping them sleek and modern.
In addition, the font used in the wordmark logo is tall with straight lines and ample spacing between each letter. The extra kerning also makes the font readable on various devices and by those with visual impairments and dyslexia.
Site Loads Fast
People today expect sites to load fast and have little patience if they don’t. Google may also rank your site lower in their search engine results pages for slow loading speeds. Anything you can do to make a site load more quickly is a bonus for users.
Mashe Modern loads the second you land on it–on desktop and mobile devices. You can invest in a better
Simple Checkout Options
Studies show checkout frustrations lead 40% of U.S. consumers to think through purchases. While we didn’t go through the entire checkout process, we did look at factors such as ease of adding items to cart and noted the one-step purchase options by clicking on the ShopPay button. Anything you can do to make things easier for users reduces abandonment rates.
What We Would Do Differently
While we like the ease of shopping and all the vivid product photos, there are always things we can point to that would make the site shine even more.
Some of the product images come across as choppy on category pages. Choosing a single size could make the shopping area of the site a bit more uniform and easier to browse.
Mashe Modern has a unique look that makes it stand out in the e-commerce quilt industry. By selling niche products, they already have an edge over other sites.
