The problem with the category
Workwear B2B has a sameness problem. Open five sites and you get five versions of the same page: a grid of products nobody photographed properly, a mega menu that lies about where it goes, and copy that reads like an HR document. The buyers are trades people, ops managers, hospitality teams and sport clubs. None of them want corporate. They want clear, fast and human.
[SHU: your call on how blunt to be about the old site. The Clothing House blog says you "took one look at it and said no". If you want that story in your own words, this is where it goes.]
Locking the design system first
The rebuild did not start with pages, it started with rules. By the time the visual work began, the system was fixed and written down: Barlow Condensed for display, DM Sans for body, #d97706 as the primary orange and #22c55e as the accent green. Everything after that had to answer to those four decisions.
That sounds like bureaucracy. It is the opposite. A locked system is what lets you build fast without every new section reopening the same argument, and it is why the site holds together across dozens of pages built months apart.
"If you can't explain why it's there, it gets cut."
The structure nobody sees
Behind the visual work the site got a full structural overhaul: a new mega menu, proper category landing pages, a hero rebuilt mobile first, and internal navigation rewired so links actually go where their labels say they go. Forty eight categories were restructured across three tiers, each with its own SEO treatment.
None of that photographs well. You notice it within about four seconds of using the old version.
A mascot instead of a stock photo
The visual identity is built around something no competitor can copy, because it does not exist anywhere else: a paper cut mascot. Beanie Boy, the Did You Know stickers, themed sprites for each category, and a photography direction that stopped the product range looking like a catalogue. Owen executed the whole visual system.
The brief for the site as a whole was a workshop noticeboard rather than a B2B catalogue. Once that was the target, most decisions answered themselves.
[SHU: one concrete story here would carry the whole post. The CH blog mentions Owen redrawing the elbow sticker twice. Pick the moment you remember and tell it.]
What DecoNetwork makes hard
Clothing House runs on DecoNetwork, which is a decorated apparel platform rather than a general web stack. That shapes everything. Custom work goes in through snippet panels and Custom Pages, so a page like the blog is a self contained widget with its own styles inlined, pasted per URL. Add a twelfth article and you paste the stylesheet a twelfth time.
You work with that or you fight it forever. We built a versioned snippet library instead, now on its seventh revision, so the same components could be dropped into new pages without rewriting them each time. Breadcrumbs, product codes and colour swatches all came out of that library.
[SHU: worth saying what you would choose differently now, given Betsy exists. That is the honest end to this section and it is the bit other people in the trade will actually want to read.]
Where it landed
The site is live at clothinghouse.co.uk with its own blog, its own voice and a visual system that belongs to it. The work is not finished, because that is the job. Wider product range, deeper category coverage, better photography, and the same personal service that picks up the phone.
If your site has been quietly underperforming, that is the kind of work I do at Bay38. There is a Say Hello section on the front page.