Case Study  ·  The Northumberland Candle Company  ·  Website Redesign

Same store.
Built to convert.

Full storefront rebuild  ·  2026  ·  figures to September 2026

The old site was a stock Shopify theme doing the bare minimum: a plain header, a single static banner, and a checkout journey with a dozen small bits of friction stacked on top of each other. We rebuilt it front to back, homepage down to the cart, with one goal: make it easier to go from "just looking" to "checked out."

Same homepage, months apart

Before and after

Same store, same products. On the left, the old homepage: a single bundle offer up top and a generic layout underneath. On the right, the rebuilt homepage: warm, image-led, and selling the actual product from the moment it loads.

The Northumberland Candle Company homepage, before and after the redesign
Before  ·  single bundle offer, generic layout After  ·  product-led hero, real photography
Under the hood

What we actually changed

Not just a fresh coat of paint. Most of the work is the stuff shoppers feel but don't consciously notice, the friction that quietly makes them leave.

01
Sticky Add to Cart bar
Scroll down a product page and the size, quantity and Add to Cart button stay pinned to the bottom of the screen. No more scrolling back up to buy once you've decided.
02
Free shipping progress bar
The cart now shows exactly how close you are to free shipping, with a running total and a little truck that fills in as you add items. Simple nudge, higher average order value.
03
Variant pills instead of dropdowns
Scent and colour choices are now tappable pills you can see at a glance, not a clunky native dropdown that hides every option behind a tap.
04
Custom accordion for product info
Ingredients, burn times and shipping info collapse into clean expandable sections instead of one long wall of text under every product.
05
Frequently bought together
Product pages now suggest what pairs well with what you're already looking at, with a one-click add, instead of leaving cross-sells to chance.
06
Sale pricing that actually reads as a sale
Fixed the price display so discounted products show the original price struck through next to the new price, so the saving is obvious instead of just showing one number.
Where things stand since

The trajectory since launch

The redesign shipped just before the store's first paid social campaign, so the two have been working together rather than in isolation. Here is what the store looks like now, measured against June 2026, the last full month before either went live.

+64%
Average order value
£18.79 → £30.74 per order
3,650
Orders per month
up from 354 in June 2026
£112,230
Monthly store revenue
up from £6,650, 16.9× in two months

We cannot cleanly separate what share of the revenue growth came from the new site versus the ads themselves, they launched close together. The average order value is the honest one to look at here: it is the number a free shipping progress bar, cross-sells on the product page and a friction-free cart are built to move, and it went from £18.79 to £30.74 on the same catalogue at the same prices. The rest is the two working together. A faster, clearer store with less friction gives every pound of ad spend a better chance of converting once someone lands on it.

Since then the store has kept the pace: £51,153 across 1,762 orders in the first fourteen days of September, and the paid social behind it has returned £164,815 on £29,266 of spend since launch, a blended 5.6× across the whole period.

Your site could be next

Slow, cluttered, or just not converting?

We build and rebuild ecommerce and small business sites the same way we grow social accounts, stripped of friction, built around what actually moves people to buy.

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FUSION CREATIVE  ·  Website Redesign  ·  The Northumberland Candle Company
Method: "before" homepage is a real capture of the store's previous homepage; "after" captured from the live site post-launch. Revenue, order and average order value figures pulled from the store's Shopify admin; ad spend and return pulled from the Meta Ads API. Baseline is June 2026, the last complete month before the redesign and the first paid campaign. Figures current to 14 September 2026.