Fraghill. 35 fragrances. Three custom ways to find yours. Rebuilt live, without losing a sale.
Client
Fraghill
Year
2026–Present
Scope of Work
Fraghill is a founder-led Indian fragrance brand: 35 scents made in Italy, 10 ml pods at ₹495, three-pod trios at ₹1,095. When I took the store over it took orders every day and looked abandoned. Two email tools loaded at once, a dead checkout SDK still ran, and the fragrance quiz hung on its last step. The previous developer was gone. The mandate was a full rebuild in weeks, and the store could not go dark for a minute.
The brief
Three kinds of buyer, three ways in. First-timers take the Decoder quiz. Bundlers build their own trio. Perfume people use the Match Maker to find the Fraghill scent closest to one they already own. All bespoke work lives in a reversible fh- layer on Avante, built on a parallel theme while the old store kept selling, then published over it on 15 July 2026 with orders flowing.
The catalogue was rebuilt around a ₹495 entry price, down from ₹1,395, which unlocked the trio, the quiz result and twelve gift sets. The store now runs on a monthly retainer. The quiz got its own telemetry collector, and in month one 29 orders, a quarter of all orders in the window, matched a quiz buy click on time and contents. The detail is in the screens below.
One thing I'd do differently: pull the 90-day order baseline and screenshot the old store on day one. Both happened two days after launch, from the one surviving copy of the old theme.
Same store, same viewport, 34 days apart.
The inherited theme on the left was taking orders every day while the rebuild ran on a parallel theme. On 15 July 2026 the new theme was published over it mid-afternoon, with the GoKwik checkout and the five app embeds ported the day before so nothing customer-facing broke. The old theme is kept as the rollback, and as the only surviving copy of the before.
The hero is the founder's own artwork, on a carousel that never jumps.
Kriti's banners run as a swipe carousel: finger-follow drag on phones, three-second autoplay, a seamless loop, and a fixed height so the page does not shift as slides move. Every slide, button, colour and timing is editable from the Shopify editor. The first slide is painted before any script runs, so the largest contentful paint is the artwork itself.
The Decoder asks four questions and draws each answer.
First-timers pick weather, intent, occasion and dislikes, each question set against an illustrated scene that changes state as the answer changes. The 184 KB scene library used to parse before anything painted; it now loads after the question and options are on screen, so the page is usable in under a second on a throttled phone. The scoring engine and the scene library are Arnav Amar's work, integrated and tuned here.
Three matches, one button, and a price the cart honours.
The result names a mood, shows the three closest 10 ml pods, and offers all three for ₹1,095. Every buy button opens the store's one-click checkout with the exact pods loaded. The month-one report matched 29 orders to this screen, a quarter of the store's orders in the window, by pairing a buy click with an order placed within ten minutes for the same three pods.
Tap three you can't stop smelling. The prototype that won the brand.
Build Your Trio started as a free working prototype ported onto the new theme in June. The founders played with it and handed over the whole store. Three slots, every fragrance with a 10 ml pod, curated directions for people who would rather be told, and a Surprise me for people who would not. The set carts as one line with the three scents as properties, so fulfilment reads them straight off the order.
Type a perfume you own. Get the Fraghill scent closest to it.
The Translator matches by character against a 2,000-perfume database and shows a match percentage for each of its three results. Arnav Amar built the engine. The integration rebound all 35 products to the live catalogue, replaced broken cover-card images with clean bottle cutouts, added popular picks and search as you type, and dressed the cards in the store's own system. Every result links to a real product page at the real price.
Three sizes on the page, from ₹495, with the trio offer beside the price.
The old store showed ₹1,395 on every card. The catalogue was rebuilt around a 10 ml pod at ₹495, with the 2 ml retired, so every product resolves to From ₹495 without a hardcoded number. Choosing 10 ml surfaces the trio offer, any three for ₹1,095. Two of the three sizes had been invisible on all 35 products for weeks because the size picker matched exact strings. Found by measuring the render, not by reading the code.
Top, middle and base notes, drawn by the brand, on every product page.
Kriti's notes artwork sits on all 35 fragrance pages and swaps to her phone version on small screens. It replaced a generic fragrance-wheel accordion. Around it the page carries her Italian banner, four trust icons, the practical details, two spotlight reviews and the full Judge.me widget, so a first-time buyer reads the scent before the reassurance.
Born in the hills of Italy, told in one editorial band.
The origin section pairs the founders' own photography with the brand's line-drawn hill town and red half-sun. It replaced a block of body copy and a glow panel after the founder asked for the picture to lead. The whole custom layer, namespaced fh-, is built this way: every heading, image and link is a setting in the theme editor, so the founders change it without coming back to me.
The perfumers behind the fragrance, as the brand drew them.
Kriti's Perfumers artwork runs on the homepage, the About page and every fragrance page as one portable section. Her 7 MB PNG went in at 1 MB and serves at 140 KB from Shopify's CDN. On phones the words inside the wide artwork would be too small to read, so the line runs in real type above it until a taller version arrives.
Gifting got its own page, because about half the orders are gifts.
Twelve ready-made sets at ₹1,095, the founders' own copy and photography, an unboxing film, and the founders' note on kraft paper. The page offers two ways out: shop the curated sets, or take the Decoder and build your own. Sets are ordinary Shopify products, so the brand adds a new one from the admin and the grid updates itself.
A gift set page that reads like a product, not a bundle.
Each set page shows the three pods in the brand's black-glove photography, the saving against list price, what is in the box and when it ships, then a scroll-snap carousel of the set's four to six images, kept separate from the buy box. The first version had gaps of 0, 110, 0 and 0 pixels between its blocks because one shorthand rule was killing every margin. Measured, fixed, and the same fix applied to the other page carrying the same bug.
A monthly report the founders can read on their phone.
The Decoder's telemetry is a Cloudflare Worker and a D1 database; emails are hashed and never stored. Month one, 4 August to 2 September 2026: 2,344 opened, 2,070 finished, 158 clicked buy, 82% arrived from Meta ads, and the median run took 29 seconds. The report is ten pages in the brand's own type, every figure re-checked against the raw rows before it went out.
