Frankie& Paws

Frankie & Paws makes daily supplements for dogs: True Calm, Biome Balance and Collagen, formulated in Britain and sold direct to UK dog owners. The founders had a brand book, a website guide, a story worth telling and a dog called Frankie. What they needed was a shop that felt as considered as the products.

The brief had real tension in it. Carry a restrained identity through an entire shopping journey, including forms, basket, emails and account pages. Give the founder story room without getting in the way of buying. Explain ingredients, benefits and dosage for a fairly technical range without turning the buy box into an essay. Build search visibility around the category and its ingredients while keeping the tone quiet. And give two founders practical tools to run orders, dispatch, customers, promotions and referrals themselves.

The identity was the founders’ own. Our job was digital art direction: reconciling the brand book and website guide, writing down the rules, and turning them into a design system that holds across every template. Forest green, warm cream and quiet neutrals, expressed as CSS variables. Astralaga for display, self-hosted, paired with Poppins for reading. Spacious layouts and large photographic areas.

The homepage went through several passes as real assets arrived. It settled on a cut-out puppy sitting directly on the cream, beside “Care, considered.” and a short description of the range. The descriptive line carries the H1 for search; the two words carry the brand. Below it: products, the founders’ story, ingredients, reviews, the journal, social imagery and email capture, with the rhythm and crops refined against founder feedback.

A photography brief translated the site’s needs into a shot list, crops and delivery specs. We prepared the transparent cut-outs and integrated founder portraits, Frankie, packshots and lifestyle imagery across desktop and mobile. The voice was documented too: understated, intelligent, calm, assured. Short sentences, specific information, no superlatives, no cute pet talk.

The product page is the clearest example of design and search being decided together. An early version placed a 250-word introduction, written for search, between the product name and the purchase controls. It pushed the price and Add to Basket too far down the page. In July we rebalanced it: a short, benefit-led pitch beside the name, then price, quantity and purchase controls, with the full explanation kept in an About section further down alongside ingredients, benefits, usage and FAQs. The crawlable content stayed. The buying hierarchy came back.

The storefront itself is custom: product listings and categories, galleries, collections and bundles, and a persistent basket. Checkout hands off to Stripe, configured for GBP and UK addresses. Later hardening moved product identity, pricing, stock checks and variant validation to the server, so the browser only submits identifiers and quantities. Payment webhooks map paid lines back to products and persist orders with a financial snapshot; anything unrecognised is rejected rather than silently producing a partial order.

Customers can register, sign in, see their orders and receive confirmation and dispatch emails that look like the rest of the brand. Subscribe & Save is a coming-soon surface; recurring billing is part of the next phase, not a delivered feature.

The site’s search architecture divides intent deliberately. Category pages answer generic commercial searches. Product pages answer the named products and the buying decision. A ten-ingredient reference hub explains each ingredient and its role in the range. Journal articles answer the broader questions owners actually ask, from dehydration to hot-weather digestion. Titles were later tightened to stop these pages competing with each other, and internal links were reworked so older articles have routes into them.

Technical foundations underneath: canonical URLs, page-specific metadata and Open Graph, sitemap coverage, redirects, genuine 404s and crawl directives. Structured data covers the online store, products and offers, shipping and returns, breadcrumbs, articles and FAQs where the visible content supports them. Store-level Trustpilot ratings were removed from product schema rather than presented as product reviews. A Google Merchant Center feed is generated from the same database prices the checkout uses.

Content work ran through the whole site: homepage messaging, the founders’ story, product and dosage information, transactional emails, buying guides and policy pages. Endorsement wording was tightened and misleading trust signals removed. Health-sensitive copy stays subject to founder and manufacturer fact review; we describe the editorial process, not the efficacy of the supplements.

What is evidenced: a bespoke, branded ecommerce site refined through months of founder feedback; an engagement that covered voice, content, search and business operations; a product page rebalanced towards buying; a large, recorded reduction in image weight; and an infrastructure migration completed with data verification.

What we do not claim: revenue growth, conversion uplift or ranking gains. The site is young and the search data is an early baseline. The next phase is documented: UK authority building, further search-led editorial, product-specific review collection, subscriptions and steady maintenance. When comparable periods of relevant search and funnel data exist, this page will be updated with them.