Case study · 2025
AS Herbal Shine — Brand Site & Storefront
- Role
- Design, frontend, content
- Stack
- Next.jsTypeScriptTailwind CSS
AS Herbal Shine is my own brand, which made this the rare project where I was the client, the designer, and the developer at once. The brief I gave myself: a site that feels as handmade as the products, loads instantly on an entry-level phone, and lets a customer order without creating an account.
The problem
Most of my customers discover the brand through WhatsApp and Instagram, browse on budget Android phones, and are wary of online payment forms. A conventional e-commerce checkout would have lost them at the first input field.
TODO: add one or two sentences about the specific customer feedback or situation that pushed you to build the site.
The approach
I designed WhatsApp-first ordering: every product page composes a pre-filled WhatsApp message with the product name and quantity, so ordering feels like messaging a shopkeeper — because it is. No cart, no account, no friction.
Product pages lead with ingredient stories rather than marketing claims. Each formula lists what is inside and why, in plain language — the same honesty I practice in the workshop.
Engineering decisions
Fully static generation: with a small catalogue that changes at most weekly, a database was complexity without benefit. The catalogue lives in a typed content file, and a rebuild takes under a minute.
A hard performance budget for 3G: compressed AVIF/WebP images with explicit dimensions, system-adjacent font loading, and almost no client JavaScript outside the theme toggle.
Outcome
TODO: add the real outcome — e.g. monthly orders via the site, repeat-customer rate, or a customer quote about the ordering flow.
What I would do differently: start the ingredient photography earlier — the words were ready long before the pictures.