Designing for how luxury buyers actually decide
Role: Experience Strategy Lead and Creative Director at Glantz
Scope: Luxury retail jewelry in Chicago, full site redesign, IA, content strategy, creative direction
Stakeholders: Owner and Designer, Studio Manager
Rebuilt the experience around how custom jewelry buyers make decisions, not how the studio was organized.
Impact at a Glance
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16.45% increase in site views
Organic search growth following redesign, with homepage views up 24.66%
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New content driving 6,500+ annual views
Lab-grown vs. natural diamonds page added, now a top-three traffic driver
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Self-scheduling appointment increase
Booking integration was a breakthrough improvement to the business
The Problem
Christopher Duquet is a goldsmith, gemologist, and custom jewelry designer whose clients are making one of the most considered purchases of their lives. The original site did not reflect that.
Content was organized around what the studio made, not how buyers decide. The consultation process, the thing that separates a custom jeweler from a retailer, was buried. And here was the real constraint: no transactions happen online. Every visit needed to end in a booked consultation, not a purchase.
The site had to feel like a shopping experience while doing an entirely different job.
What was at risk:
Qualified buyers arriving with no clear path to booking a consultation
Warm leads ready to act with nowhere to go
A site organized around studio logic losing buyers at the research stage, before they ever considered reaching out
Key Decisions & Trade-offs
The critical question:
Do luxury jewelry buyers shop the same way retail buyers do?
Research said no. Custom jewelry clients research extensively before contacting anyone, comparing stones, reading about process, and deciding whether to trust a designer before they ask for time. The site needed to support that entire journey, not just capture buyers who were already ready to act.
One constraint shaped every decision: no transactions happen online. The site needed to feel like a curated shopping experience while its actual job was converting browsers into booked consultations.
The decision: design for trust and discovery, not purchase.
Lead with educational content buyers are actively searching for
Make consultation booking the primary conversion path
Edit the product inventory to reinforce a bespoke, high-consideration feeling rather than volume
What I Led
I owned experience strategy and creative direction end-to-end, working directly with Christopher to align on buyer insight before a single design decision was made.
Phase 1: Strategy, IA, and UX
Discovery and framing:
Conducted stakeholder sessions with Christopher to map how clients move through the buying process and where the existing site was losing them
Identified content gaps between what buyers were searching for and what the site offered, surfacing the lab-grown vs. natural diamonds page as a high-priority net-new addition
Built persona frameworks for two primary buyer types: the research-led first-time custom jewelry buyer and the returning client expanding a collection
Information architecture and content strategy:
Rebuilt site IA from scratch around buyer journey rather than product category
Defined content hierarchy for each page, establishing which questions to answer first and how to move buyers toward booking
Mapped consultation booking as the primary conversion path and specified requirements for the scheduling integration
UX and conversion design:
Designed dedicated pathways driving toward consultation booking across all entry points: product exploration, gemstone type, and custom design services, ensuring every content type resolved to the same conversion action regardless of how a buyer entered the site
Driving mechanisms to book appointment
Navigation system to drive user research
E-commerce driven user flows for exploring product
UX and UI component systems for conversion
Phase 2: Creative Direction and Execution
Visual design direction:
Directed the Glantz design team through visual development, establishing the creative brief and quality filters governing every design decision
Set direction balancing luxury positioning with approachability: high craft without intimidation, for buyers uncertain whether custom jewelry is within reach
Managed the content designer through final copy development, ensuring voice and messaging traced back to the buyer journey framework from Phase 1
Client relationship:
Navigated strong client creative instincts by grounding every direction decision in buyer research, keeping strategy intact through multiple review cycles
Maintained Phase 1 strategic framework as the decision filter across client reviews, preventing late-stage scope shifts that would have undermined the IA rationale
Built client trust in the strategic approach before presenting creative, sequencing reviews to separate experience decisions from aesthetic ones
Before: Content Heavy Retail Jewelry Website Homepage
After: Homepage with Purchase User Paths
Outcomes
Site Performance
51.6% engagement rate across all sessions
16.45% increase in site views compared to the prior period, with homepage views up 24.66%
Lab-grown vs. natural diamonds, a net-new page built from the content strategy, is now a top-three traffic driver on the site
Structural Results
Consultation booking replaced phone inquiry as the primary client acquisition path
Site architecture built to accommodate future limited-collection e-commerce without restructuring the experience
Christopher described the self-scheduling integration as a paradigm shift in how the studio acquires customer