ER-ZUM-AH The Label is a one-woman fashion house with twenty-five years behind it. It was previously known as Bestow Elan. Her work has been in Grazia and on Thandie Newton. Her website led with a 10%-off pop-up before you'd seen a single garment. Her clothes, her teaching, her accessories and her community were split across twelve platforms, none of which pointed to each other.

I restructured the site around the founder, with four clear ways in: the collections, the accessories, the studio and the community. I tested two directions with seven women, and built a V1 prototype in Wix.

The live homepage, scrolled in sequence. Five friction points identified before a single product is reached.

A heuristic evaluation is a structured way of auditing an interface against a set of established usability principles, rather than against other websites. I used Nielsen Norman's ten heuristics, the industry-standard list, and went through the live site principle by principle, noting where it broke each rule and what the redesign would do in response. Eight of the ten surfaced clear, repeated issues. Two, error prevention and error recovery, were lighter for a content-led store rather than a complex transactional one, and I've noted them as such rather than forcing findings that weren't there. The table reads left to right: the principle, the problem on the current site, and the move the redesign makes against it.

Adaeze, the primary persona, is a culturally intentional buyer in her forties who discovers the brand on Instagram and wants original construction she cannot find elsewhere. Anna, a secondary persona drawn from a real observed customer, represents reach and advocacy: proof the work travels beyond its core community.

Adaeze's empathy map distilled what she says, thinks, does and feels approaching a brand like this.

Two journeys were mapped: the current-site friction journey, where the path to purchase repeats and accumulates from landing to product; and a pre-testing hypothesis journey for Adaeze across both design directions, discovery to purchase and return.

Adaeze · Discovery to purchase and return · Pre-testing hypothesis map

The core path: discovery, browse, purchase, was mapped for both directions — Founder First and Print as Hero — with the decision points and drop-off routes marked. It set what each screen had to carry before any were drawn.

The homepage began as a low-fidelity concept: founder-first hero, the press strip, one featured piece, then the four doors. Structure before detail.

Low fidelity concept. Redrawn for legibility from the original sketch

The restructure did two things at once. Nine inventory filters, all of them ways of slicing the clothing, collapsed into two product doors: The Collections and Accessories. Two further doors, Studios and The Alignment, gave the teaching practice and the community a place in the architecture for the first time; the old navigation hadn't acknowledged either. Four doors where there had been an undifferentiated product grid, with the founder and her story surfaced at entry rather than buried beneath it.

Information architecture: before and after. Nine inventory filters and a buried story, beside four clear doors and a founder-led structure. On Wix.

Four homepage directions were wireframed on mobile, each testing a different hypothesis about what the brand needed to lead with.

Founder First and Print as Hero were taken to high-fidelity prototype and tested head-to-head — the only way to settle which trust signal worked harder: the person or the work.

The two directions weren't chosen on taste. The research had left one question unresolved: what is the trust signal for this brand, the founder, or the work? Each direction is the strongest possible expression of one answer. Founder First tests that the person is the signal (supported by her social data, where her voice out-performed her products). Print as Hero tests that the work is the signal (supported by twenty-five years of construction craft that could reasonably speak first). Both were taken to high-fidelity, interactive prototypes and tested head-to-head, because head-to-head testing was the only way to settle a question the audit couldn't.

Founder First won decisively. It was built on these decisions: The founder leads; one featured collection replaces a row of equal-weight options; naming follows the print families rather than inventory categories. Her existing sage (#E6EEE9) stayed the system colour, as a V1 prototype meets the client where she is, rather than imposing a palette overhaul.

The clearest disagreement of the project was naming. The audit had surfaced a real problem: on the live site, mood labels in her voice ("Stunningly Chic") collided with functional product names ("Mercy Print Drape Side Shirt") at equal visual weight, so a visitor couldn't tell what the product was actually called. My three-part system, print family, an energy word, then the product form, was built to fix that: the energy layer was meant to give those scattered mood labels one fixed home. The founder felt the result was "more of a theme than a story" and that it would break the instinctive way she names things. Rather than settle it on authority, I carried both instincts into testing. I dropped the energy layer and simplified to her family-led logic, and seven of seven testers then recalled the family name "Mercy" unprompted. I was right about the problem; she was right about the fix. The community section, tested as "Seen in the Wild," became "Out and About" afterwards, a warmer register.

The homepage moved from a generic, product-less entry to a founder-led one.

Seven women new to the brand, moderated, on mobile, comparing the two directions head-to-head.

The founder-led entry won decisively: the hero declaration stopped every Founder First tester before they looked at anything else, and all four reached the journal within two minutes, unprompted. All seven testers recalled "Mercy" unprompted.

The initial prototype used the full Sankofa quote as the hero line. The V1 build distilled it to one short line in her own voice: I'm back. And I brought everything with me. Followed by READ MY JOURNEY → and a boxed CTA: ENTER THE LABEL. The philosophy is intact; the barrier is gone. The full quote lives in the Journal where context exists around it. In the V1, her story now sits at the front door, one tap from the hero through Read My Journey, while the Journal stays in the footer as the archive it was on the live site.

The V1 homepage leads with the founder, carries a press strip (Grazia, Vogue, Daily Express, New African Woman) and one featured collection (Mercy), then opens into the four doors.

A quiet declaration of handmade elegance. Five pieces from our latest editorial series, where construction is the soul and the print is the surface.

The Mercy Collection. The featured lead: a founder-voice descriptor and a five-piece carousel, in place of the old equal-weight grid.

The full prototype walkthrough is in the video at the top of this case study

This project did not give ER-ZUM-AH a new identity. It revealed and structured the one that was already there.