Kala Curry. 800+ products, 56 artisans, 55 collections. A marketplace where the maker is never anonymous.

The full store. Before reading anything.

A walkthrough of kalacurry.in at 1440px: homepage with full-bleed video hero and personality navigation, a product detail page with live CRO signals, and the artisan directory.

A theme product dump. Rebuilt around personality, not product.

The original homepage was the Reformation theme out of the box: a static banner, a product grid, and nothing that communicated what Kala Curry was or who it was for.

• Typography: ClashDisplay 600 for headings, Degular 400 for body, warm beige #EDE7E0 base. The type system replaced the theme's defaults and carries through every page.

• Hero: full-bleed autoplay video replacing the static banner. The first frame shows hands at work, not a product flat-lay.

• Personality discovery: five pills above the fold, each linking to a curated collection. Purple #C698EF "For The Whimsical Girlie", Red #D45144 "For The Desi Baddie", Navy #004D8D "For The One With Taste", Lime #A3C600 "For The Dopamine-Detoxer", Green #00864C "For The Gardener".

• Collection scroll: kc-collection-scroll.liquid, a horizontal scroll row with configurable card shape, hover states, and edge fade. Replaces the default grid.

Within five seconds a visitor knows the brand's personality, sees the range of what's available, and has a browsing path that matches how they think about themselves, not how a database categorizes craft.

One video. Five personality pills. No product grid above the fold.

The rebuilt homepage opens with a full-bleed autoplay video — hands at work, not a product flat-lay. Below it: five personality pills linking directly to curated collections. The editorial selections row uses horizontal scroll, not a grid. Every section earns its place. A first-time visitor understands the brand within five seconds without reading a single word of body copy.

Medium-based browsing retired. Discovery by identity, not by material.

A quiz was prototyped and dropped. Customers skip quizzes. Passive browsing wins when the entry points are opinionated enough that the customer sees themselves in one of the options immediately.

• "For The Whimsical Girlie": Purple #C698EF

• "For The Desi Baddie": Red #D45144

• "For The One With Taste": Navy #004D8D

• "For The Dopamine-Detoxer": Lime #A3C600

• "For The Gardener": Green #00864C

On mobile the pills scroll horizontally in a single row. Every pill label, color, and collection target is configurable in the Shopify theme editor without touching Liquid.

Most marketplaces don't say why they exist. This one puts it on the homepage.

The kc-origin-story.liquid section sits in the first scroll of the homepage, not in an About page that most visitors never find. It renders as a two-column split: a solid green left panel at #326539 carrying the brand's founding copy, and a right column with a configurable image carousel showing the artisans and the craft in process. The copy names the maker, names the craft form, and makes explicit that the product ships from the artisan's hands. That specificity is the point. Everything in the section, column widths, slide count, card radius, is configurable from the theme editor. The decision to put it on the homepage rather than an About page was a brief-level call: if artisan identity is the differentiator, the homepage has to say so before the customer reaches a product.

55 collections. Not just by craft, by mood, price, and personality.

The collection vocabulary runs across four dimensions: craft-based (Clay, Embroidery, Wood), mood-based (Festive, Crowd Favorites, One Of A Kind), price-tiered (Under 1000), and personality-driven (the five pill collections). The primary navigation carries 12 categories, which means a customer can orient by what they want to make, what they want to spend, or who they are. The kc-collection-scroll.liquid section renders these collections as a horizontal scroll row: cards with configurable shape (square, rounded, circle), a hover state that lifts the card, and an edge fade on both ends signaling more content. Each of the 55 collections carries a keyword-targeted description and generates a CollectionPage schema block via collection-schema.liquid. Art Wear, Festive, and One Of A Kind are the three highest-traffic collections by GSC click data in the first three months.

55 collections across craft, mood, and price. Each one discoverable.

Kala Curry carries 817 products from 56 independent artisans. Organizing that catalog into a browsable experience took 55 collections: by craft medium (clay, wood, embroidery, lippan art), by mood (Loud and Proud, Instant Serotonin, Too Cute to Compute), by price (Under 1000), and by occasion (Diwali, Rakhi, Housewarming). The custom collection scroll section renders each as a horizontally scrollable row with configurable image shapes, hover effects, and edge fading. CollectionPage schema markup indexes every one for Google.

A product page with zero urgency. The CRO layer changed that.

The original PDP showed the product, a description, and an add-to-cart button. No social proof, no scarcity, nothing to move a hesitant buyer. The rebuilt page runs a live view counter that follows realistic Indian traffic patterns, peaking between 11 AM and 6 PM, incrementing by one every 25 to 55 seconds. Stock urgency kicks in at three thresholds: 'Only X left' below 4 units, 'Low in stock' between 5 and 9, 'Selling fast' between 10 and 15. The add-to-cart button is sticky. Judge.me reviews auto-publish with verified buyer badges. Every signal ties to real Shopify inventory data.

Reviews, trust signals, and the artist's name. All on one page.

Below the add-to-cart area, the PDP runs collapsible accordion tabs for product description, About the Artist, Shipping and Returns, and Care Guide. Side panels expand for detailed policies without leaving the page. Judge.me reviews show star ratings, verified buyer badges in teal (#108474), and paginated review lists. The variant picker switches between color swatches and dropdowns depending on option type. A size guide modal loads content from a dedicated Shopify page. Every element exists because a buyer spending on handcrafted art needs confidence before committing.

Product page rebuilt. Every trust signal within one scroll.

Below the add-to-cart area, the PDP runs collapsible accordion tabs: product description, About the Artist, Shipping and Returns, and Care Guide. The variant picker switches between color swatches and dropdowns depending on option type. A size guide modal loads from a dedicated Shopify page. The maker's name and photo link directly to their vendor collection. Every element exists because a buyer spending on handcrafted art needs confidence before committing.

You don't start with Liquid when you have 800+ products.

The architecture diagram maps the six build phases, the custom section library, the SEO infrastructure, and the data relationships between vendors, products, and collections.

• November 2025: Reformation theme setup, base configuration, product import, vendor structure established

• December 2025: SEO infrastructure: collection-schema.liquid, faq-schema.liquid, breadcrumb-schema.liquid, meta templates for all page types, 46 collection descriptions with target keywords

• December 2025: About Us custom sections: CS Brand Story and CS Our Team built and populated

• January 2026: Full theme rebuild: kc-personality-categories.liquid, kc-origin-story.liquid, kc-collection-scroll.liquid, countdown banner, typography system, homepage video hero

• January to February 2026: Custom footer redesign, vendor directory (kc-vendor-list.liquid), full PDP CRO layer

• February 2026: kc- section library finalized: all sections documented and theme-editor configurable

Every custom section carries the kc- prefix to namespace it away from the base theme.

Research before Liquid.

The design brief captures the platform constraints before any code was written. 56 independent artisans and studios. 55 collections across craft, mood, price, and personality. 15+ craft forms from clay to lippan art. The mission: artists named, fairly valued, paid on their own terms. Four decisions shaped everything that followed. Personality-based discovery over traditional filters. A CRO layer on every product page. SEO infrastructure from day one. Artisan identity at every touchpoint. 817 products live. 1,500+ orders fulfilled. 14 months of continuous development.

Performance.

The homepage carries a full-bleed autoplay video. That is a deliberate trade: engagement over Lighthouse score on the one page that introduces the brand. The scores referenced in this case study come from collection pages and product detail pages, where customers actually convert. Those pages are built entirely in native Liquid with no page builders, no injected third-party DOM, and no client-side rendering frameworks. They are fast because there is nothing unnecessary on them. The homepage score is not the number in this portfolio, and that is intentional.