Lumen Atelier
Lighting made by hand. Configured in WebGL.
A second-generation craftsman from Kraków wanted to sell directly to interior designers in Berlin, Milan, and New York. His existing Shopify site looked like every other lighting store — same template, same product grid, no soul. The work itself was extraordinary; the storefront was hiding it.
Make the configurator the product. A WebGL space where you compose a lamp piece-by-piece — pick a body, an arm, a finish, a bulb temperature — and watch it render in real time as the price updates. The site is the showroom. The catalogue exists, but only as inspiration to drop you into the configurator.
We started with a more traditional 'browse the catalogue, then customise' approach. The founder watched a friend use it for thirty seconds in a usability test and got bored. We tore down the IA, made the configurator the entry point, and used the catalogue as a backup discovery surface. Forced commitment quadrupled session length.
Ten directions. One shipped.
Every project starts as ten homepages, fully built. The client picks the one that ships. The other nine aren’t waste — they’re the proof we looked before we leapt.
pickedInteractive finish-selector updates ambient glow colour and price in real time; dark-canvas product shot reacts to the chosen finish.
rejectedFull-bleed moody hero photograph with amber overlay; enormous Cormorant display headline over a warm-dark canvas with an image strip footer.
rejectedCream left column with giant serif headline and live stats; product photograph bleeds to the right edge — editorial magazine proportions.
rejectedAsymmetric six-photo editorial grid across the full viewport; museum-style captions and a CTA overlay on the panoramic bottom strip.
rejectedMaximum restraint — single centred lamp on vast parchment field; thin vertical rules, Cinzel brand mark, generous white space.
rejectedBento-style mosaic of six product images each labelled with a finish name; dark charcoal canvas makes warm brass accents glow.
rejectedSplit: founder portrait in sepia wash on the left; handwritten-feel narrative prose with pull quote from Anna Borowska on the right.
rejectedHigh-intent product page layout — hero image with thumbnails, spec table, star rating, price, and two CTAs; warm white showroom feel.
rejectedNear-imageless hero built entirely from cascading Cormorant italic statements and amber rules; statistics in Space Mono ground the poetry.
rejectedMulti-band layout: moody hero photograph with ember glow bloom, prose strip, square image shelf, sketch inset, and pull-quote — intimate workshop atmosphere.
Pick four things, watch it build, watch the price move. That's the whole shop.
Next.js + Three.js (React Three Fiber). Payload CMS for the atelier's story, materials, and process. Stripe Checkout with international shipping calculation across 14 countries.
avg. order value. industry baseline: €580
countries sold to in the first quarter
avg. configurator session. previous Shopify: 41 seconds
We'd have built the configurator first and the catalogue second. We did it backwards and spent a week unwinding the IA.
We'd have tested shipping math earlier. Fourteen countries' worth of edge cases surfaced in the last 48 hours.
“We are no longer just a lamp shop. We are a place people come to play.”
