Marlow & Finch
Commerce for a design house
An online store for a design house that refused to look like a store. Gallery-grade commerce that still converts.
- Year2025
- Runs onWeb
- DisciplineWebsites & Web Apps
A sample brief, a real product. We wrote this brief ourselves to show how we work; the client and their story are illustrative. The product is not: it was designed and engineered here, and you can use it below. We publish results only for work a client has let us verify, so this page shows none.
The brief
Marlow & Finch sells objects people covet, and the old shop flattened them into a grid of thumbnails. We rebuilt the storefront to feel like the showroom.
The problem
Beautiful and fast usually fight. We wanted full-bleed imagery and buttery motion without the store crawling on mobile data.
- Editorial layouts that still sell
- Sub-two-second loads on mobile
- A checkout that never breaks the spell
- A CMS the client can actually run
The approach
We treated the product page like a spread in a magazine, then engineered relentlessly to keep it light.
- Headless commerce, static-first delivery
- Image pipeline tuned per breakpoint
- A restrained motion layer, GPU-friendly
- A headless CMS mapped to their language
What shipped
- Categories, search and sort
- Quick view with variants
- Saved items and recently viewed
- Cart drawer with promo codes and shipping rules
- Full product pages with variants and reviews
- Four-step checkout that creates orders
- Account: orders, tracking, returns, invoices, addresses, gift cards
Under the surface
How it is built
Headless commerce: Nuxt 3 renders the storefront at the edge on Cloudflare Workers, pulling catalogue and checkout from the Shopify Storefront GraphQL API, with Pinia managing cart state optimistically.
- GraphQL persisted queries, cache-tagged per product
- Optimistic cart with server reconciliation
- Core Web Vitals green across the catalogue
Considered and turned down
A custom Laravel commerce stack — Shopify’s checkout conversion and PCI scope made headless the smarter trade.
Stack
The mechanism, working
The part of Marlow & Finch that was hardest to get right, as a small model you can operate.
Edge-rendered commerce
Storefront rendered on Cloudflare Workers with persisted GraphQL queries, so pages are assembled close to the shopper instead of at one distant origin.
