Project
Bend Soap Co.

About project
Bend Soap Company is a US-based natural skincare brand built around goat milk soap products. The origin story is one of the most compelling in the D2C skincare space a family searching for a solution to their son's severe eczema, working through dermatologists and chemical treatments that did not help, before discovering that handcrafted goat milk soap made from clean, simple ingredients was what actually worked. That story real ingredients, visible transformation, a family mission is one of the most powerful conversion assets any skincare brand can have. The brand had it. The website was not using it. The original site was a decent Shopify implementation with warmth but it had significant structural problems that were quietly hurting the shopping experience: a passive hero that positioned the brand only on price, an ingredients section that existed but was treated as secondary content rather than a primary trust-builder, no Featured In section despite the brand having appeared in Inc., Good Housekeeping, Yahoo, BuzzFeed, and The Bulletin, testimonials with no visual evidence of results, and a checkout with unnecessary steps and no guest-first path. The redesign's job was to take every asset the brand already had and move it to where it could actually do its job.



What I did
The most significant visual decision in this redesign was the shift to a clean black-and-white UI system. The original site used warm teal CTAs, botanical illustrations, and earthy background tones that felt homely but did not match the brand's own logo, which is a clean monochrome mark. That mismatch was creating a subtle inconsistency that eroded the sense of a coherent brand. The redesign resolves this by making all UI elements navigation, CTAs, section backgrounds, icons black and white, and letting the product photography carry all the warmth and colour. Fourteen specific changes were made across the homepage. The hero was upgraded from a static product image to an interactive video background that communicates the brand story immediately. The ingredients section was redesigned with generous white space and linear icons six key ingredients made visual, prominent, and scannable, because natural skincare buyers read ingredient labels and this section needs to reward that attention. A Featured In strip was added near the top of the page showing Inc., Good Housekeeping, Yahoo, BuzzFeed, and The Bulletin third-party credibility of that quality belongs in the first scroll, not absent from the homepage entirely. The testimonials section was rebuilt with before-and-after user photographs showing real eczema results, because text reviews tell you something worked but photographs show you. Checkout was streamlined — three unnecessary fields removed, guest checkout made primary, estimated delivery date shown at cart stage. Fourteen changes, each addressing one specific problem that was either hurting the experience or leaving a conversion opportunity unused.
