E-commerce Skincare Brand
Needed an elegant e-commerce presence to sell handmade luxury body butter directly to customers. Built a premium, soft-toned online store featuring distinct product lines for men and women, clear ingredient highlights, and a seamless shopping experience.
Amanda Brinkley makes whipped body butter by hand, in small batches, in North Carolina. Cocoa butter, mango butter, shea, jojoba, almond oil. The product is genuinely good, and that is exactly the problem with selling it online.
Everything this product is good at is invisible through a screen. You cannot smell it. You cannot feel how it melts instead of sitting greasy on the skin. You cannot pick up the jar. A handmade skincare brand is selling a sensory experience through the one medium that removes every sense except sight.
Underneath that sits a trust problem. Someone about to put an unfamiliar cream on their skin, bought from a small brand they have never heard of, has real questions. Who actually made this. What is in it. Is it safe for my skin type. Is this a real business or someone who will vanish after taking my money. Big skincare brands answer that with recognition. A small-batch maker has to answer it on the page.
And there was a practical constraint that shaped everything. Amanda is not technical, and had no interest in becoming technical. Any store that needed her to manage plugins or fight with settings would have quietly failed, no matter how good it looked on launch day.
Product photos and product details. That was the whole brief. No page plan, no reference sites, no instructions on how it should work. Amanda knows her product and had no interest in learning about websites, so working out how to sell something nobody can smell or feel was my job, not hers. Everything on the page was built out from what she sent.
Two lines, two different conversations. Women and men do not buy scent the same way. The women’s line leads on sweet, warm, confidence-boosting scents. The men’s line leads on clean, bold, fresh. Same product, same quality, two separate sections with their own language, so nobody has to work out which part of the range is meant for them.
The ingredients are the sales copy. In skincare, the ingredient list is not small print, it is the main argument. So it gets its own section, laid out plainly: cocoa butter, mango butter, shea butter, coconut oil, jojoba, almond oil, vitamin E, arrowroot powder. Nothing buried in a paragraph. For a customer with sensitive skin, that list is the deciding factor.
Answer the hesitation before it becomes a lost sale. Is it handmade. Is it suitable for all skin types. How long does shipping take. How do I store it. How do I actually use it. These are the questions that stop someone at the checkout, and they are answered on the page rather than left for an email that never gets sent.
Proof that a real person is behind it. Photography of the actual jars in actual hands, not stock imagery. Handmade in Wilmington, North Carolina, stated plainly. A real address, a real phone number, clear refund and shipping policies, recognised payment methods at the footer. Each one is small. Together they are the difference between a real brand and something a stranger will not risk their skin on.
A restock list, because small batch means selling out. For a maker working in small batches, running out is normal and it is also the moment demand is highest. An email list turns a sold-out product from a lost sale into a queue of people waiting for the next batch.
Built so she never has to touch the technical side. Adding a product, changing a price, swapping a photo. That is her job and it takes minutes. Everything underneath it is mine.
Amanda runs her own shop without being technical, which was the actual requirement behind all of it. The store does the explaining, the reassuring and the selling, and she does the part she is good at.
The best evidence here is not something I can claim for myself. Amanda has been working with me for five years across two websites, I still maintain the site for her, and she recorded a video saying so in her own words. You can watch it on the reviews page.
Five years and a second project is a harder thing to fake than any number I could put on this page. People do not come back twice to someone who was difficult to work with.
It sits alongside Luma Aesthetic, L’Essence d’Épure and the Pilates studio as a version of the same idea. A website earns its money by answering the question the customer has not asked out loud yet. For a med spa that question is whether this place is worth the price. For a handmade skincare brand it is whether a stranger should put this on their skin.
Twenty minutes, free, no pressure. Tell me about your business and I'll give you a clear plan.
