A heritage pottery brand built for international shipping.
Hand-painted Multani blue pottery — the craft is centuries old. The storefront needed to honour that without scaring international buyers off the shipping costs.
- Client
- Arraish
- Sector
- Heritage · Blue Pottery
- Engagement
- Storefront rebuild → Launch
- Year
- 2025
✱ § 01 · The brief
What they actually needed.
Arraish sells handcrafted Multani blue pottery — dinner sets, tea sets, planters, lamps, decorative pieces — across seven design families (Blue Felicity, Tranquility, Serina Blue, and four more). The market was 70% domestic Pakistan, 30% international (US, UK, GCC). The pottery is the product; the cart was the problem.
International buyers added 4-5 pieces, then bounced when the shipping calculator landed at the cart. The friction was the unknown — customs, ceramics-safe packing, transit time, returns on fragile goods. The previous site answered none of those questions before the customer was already in the funnel.
“We make 200-year-old craft. The site has to be honest about how it gets to a buyer in Houston — and it has to be honest before the cart.”
✱ § 02 · Our approach
Three bets, in order.
Show shipping ranges on product cards.
International buyers see '$22-$48 to USA · 14-21 days' before they add to cart, not after. Per-region pricing tiers visible inline. The unknown becomes known one tap earlier.
Dedicated international hubs.
/us, /uk, /gcc landing pages with the right currency, shipping bands, customs disclaimers, and transit estimates pre-answered. Localised hero photography. Generic checkout still works — but the on-ramp is region-aware.
A lookbook for the craft itself.
Photo essays of the kilns in Multan, the artisans, the seven design family origins. SEO content with cultural depth — not generic product copy. Internal links from product pages to the relevant heritage essay.
✱ § 03 · Process · 8 weeks
From kickoff to shipped.
Wk 1
Audit + international funnel forensics
Pulled 6 months of cart-abandonment data — international cart abandonment ran at 79%, vs. 31% domestic. Mapped every drop-off point. The shipping calculator surprise was the single biggest leak.
Wk 2–3
Architecture + photography
Designed the international hub pattern, the per-card shipping band display, and the heritage lookbook structure. Two-day shoot in Multan for the kiln + artisan photo essays.
Wk 4–6
Build · Shopify + shipping engine
Custom Shopify theme with regional landing variants, custom shipping calculator with per-product weight + fragility multiplier, Klaviyo flows segmented by region. First international test order from a UK colleague at end of week 5.
Wk 7
Soft launch + customs copy
Live for the US first. Customs-disclaimer copy reviewed by a freight forwarder. Adjusted the heritage lookbook hero crops based on session replays — too much white space at the top, fixed.
Wk 8
UK + GCC live + handover
All three international hubs live. Trained the in-house team on the per-region inventory rules and the lookbook CMS. Old site decommissioned 14 days post-launch.
✱ § 04 · Gallery · key screens
Selected screens.
✱ § 05 · Results · measured 6 months post-launch
What changed, in numbers.
- +120%
- International orders
- −34%
- Pre-cart bounce
- 12%
- Repeat-order rate
- 4 of 7
- Collections top-3 organic
3 months post-launch, all regions
International traffic only
Up from 4% baseline
'Blue pottery' + variants, US SERP
✱ § 07 · In their words
Customers in the US now see what shipping costs before they fall in love with a piece. The honest version sells better.
Founder
Arraish · Arraish
✱ § 08 · Tech stack
What's running.
- Storefront
- Shopify · Custom Liquid theme
- Shipping
- Custom rate engine · per-region tiers
- Lifecycle
- Klaviyo (region-segmented flows)
- Payments
- Card · PayPal · Apple Pay
- Content
- Sanity (lookbook + heritage)
- Hosting
- Shopify · Cloudflare
✱ § 09 · Team
Who built it.
- Affan Manzoor
- Project lead
- ChampX design
- Theme + heritage lookbook
- ChampX engineering
- Liquid + shipping engine
- ChampX content
- Heritage essays + region copy
✱ § 10 · Honesty section
What we’d do differently.
01 · Customs copy needed legal review per region
Wrote one boilerplate disclaimer. The US wanted a tariff-line callout, the UK wanted a VAT note, the GCC wanted a duty-paid clarification. Now the disclaimer is region-templated — should have been from the start.
02 · Should have built bundle pricing earlier
Set buyers (a 6-piece dinner set vs. 6 individual pieces) wanted a single price. Built the bundle in v2 — wish we'd shipped it day one. AOV on dinner-set bundles is now 2.1× the unbundled average.
03 · Heritage photo essays cost more than scoped
Two-day shoot in Multan was four days by the time we accounted for kiln visits and artisan interviews. Set realistic timelines — and budget — for storytelling content next time.
