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. 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.
