A tailor-made catalog site for a Made in Japan eyewear brand.
DANSHARI is the brand of an Italian company: frames produced in Japan, name and philosophy inspired by zen, thirty years of craftsmanship. The previous site had been built by an agency on a template bought online: rigid, hard to personalize and weighed down by 35 plugins with expired licenses, forcing the company to pay dozens of subscriptions every year to keep the site running.
DANSHARI sells only through selected opticians: the site had to be a catalog, not a shop. The brand philosophy was clear: "DANSHARI eyewears cannot be purchased online, but only from selected retailers. We believe it is essential for prescription glasses, as medical devices, to require the consultation, professionalism, and precision of highly qualified optical staff."
The previous site mixed two different page builders, making every change a battle with the code. The store locator could not be updated with a simple CSV file from Excel, forcing the team to depend on the agency for every change.
""We need a catalog site that shows all models without online sale, but the current site is a rigid template with 35 expired plugins, two conflicting page builders and a store locator impossible to update. We want to eliminate the recurring license costs and have a clean system we can manage ourselves." Initial request from the client"
Sitemap and flow first, then design. The site had to speak to opticians, retailers and international distributors, in English, without trying to sell directly: every page guides the professional toward the contact or toward the store locator.
I designed the structure and the experience of the site on the materials provided by the brand: logo, palette, typography and product photographs. My work was to translate the zen philosophy of DANSHARI into a minimal, clean and international interface, without forcing the visual language of the brand.
WordPress with Bricks Builder instead of the old mix of page builders. I custom-coded WooCommerce to work as a catalog, without installing additional plugins for this function. I added a store locator with CSV upload from Excel, so the team can update retailers autonomously. The site runs with 10 plugins of which I own LTD licenses: zero recurring costs for the client.
Today the DANSHARI site tells the same essentiality of its frames: clean, fast, international and built to be updated by the team without depending on an agency.
The site for a fashion company is fundamental. I realized we had a slow site, blocked by a rigid template. Not exciting, it did not convey the beauty of our glasses nor the passion we put in every day. I decided to entrust the creation of the new site to a young man with great inventiveness and talent: Valentino Sciacca. It was not an easy task. He had to create an exciting site, rich in images and color, but that worked well technically. That offered, that is, the possibility to search and see our glasses perfectly and in detail. Valentino rebuilt everything from zero: a clean, fast and exciting international catalog. Today I can say that finally we have a site worthy of our products, that our team can update in total autonomy. It is a truly beautiful site but extremely easy to manage and update. Goal reached. Well done Valentino.
