Payal Khandwala
Founded in Mumbai, Payal Khandwala is a label known for bold colour, sharp lines, and painterly prints. Each collection draws on Indian craft traditions yet pushes them into a resolutely modern frame, from pleated silks to sculptural tailoring. Beyond garments, her world extends into fine leather bags and homeware, positioning the brand as a new voice in international contemporary luxury.
We were asked to reimagine their e-commerce experience, translating her artistry into a platform as elevated as the collections themselves.
Creating a digital platform that brings Payal Khandwala’s world to a global audience
When Payal Khandwala came to us, her collections were already resonating in India and select markets, but the digital experience didn’t reflect the sophistication of her design language. Her prints, fine fabrics, and craft got diluted in her online presentation. She needed a digital expression that matched her ambition: to become a global fashion house.
The Challenge
The existing site suffered from a digital presence that fell short of the brand’s vision: it didn’t allow space for storytelling, texture, or nuance. At the same time, global complexity was creating friction, with language barriers and multi-currency checkouts adding unnecessary barriers. As collections continued to grow, the platform also lacked the scalability and flexibility needed to adapt to new categories, capsules, and content. Most importantly, the digital experience wasn’t delivering emotional resonance, customers couldn’t quite feel the fabric, the fold, or the intention behind every stitch.
So our brief was to fuse editorial and commerce without compromise.
Our Approach
We started by immersing ourselves in Payal’s process, her designs, swatches, collection stories, and campaign shoots, which gave us the foundation to build a digital system that felt true to her brand. Typography, motion, and texture became the tools to translate her artistry into a responsive, tactile online experience.
We created a brand system that lives across medium: the way her prints speak in IRL had to translate online. We built guidelines for tone, spacing, image hierarchy, and modular content patterns that flex for future capsules.
Homepage
The Moment the Digital Experience Matched the Craft
Payal and her team felt an immediate shift. The new website finally mirrored the brand they’d spent years building. What they’d never had before, was a digital space that matched the intelligence and craft of the garments, it suddenly clicked into place.
Splitting the collections into Contemporary and Heritage was a quiet but powerful moment. It made the brand feel more accessible to Western buyers without diluting Payal’s story. People could land, understand, and shop without second-guessing whether the pieces were for them. And once they did, the whole experience flowed beautifully. Multi-currency, international checkout, no friction, no fuss. We even introduced an Arabic version of the web build — fully flipped — because so much of Payal’s global audience shops from the Middle East. That alone opened doors the old site simply couldn’t.
The creative direction came straight from hours of sitting with Payal, listening to how she thinks. She sees the world differently, so the Shopify interface had to follow suit. Smaller, off-centre titles. A calmer, more architectural rhythm to the typography. Plenty of air so the garments could breathe. We used negative space with intent, not just for aesthetic purity but to let the textures, folds and movement of the garments carry themselves with quiet confidence.
Web Design & Build
How We Crafted, Built and Delivered the Experience
We leaned into video throughout, especially on product pages and collection headers, to get closer to the real-life tactility of her fabrics. Switching between colourways through swatches gave customers a better sense of the work. Nothing gimmicky, just thoughtful choices that honoured the craft.
Behind the scenes, the build was all about long-term resilience. Shopify is brilliant for a brand like Payal’s — lean, global, scalable, but only if you shape it properly. We created modular content blocks that could adapt to future campaigns, new product types, even completely new categories. Everything from artisan stories to fabric techniques could be dropped in without breaking the grid. The system decides which version of the site loads depending on where a customer is in the world. Multi-currency, translations, global shipping, all baked in from day one.
The process itself was very human. It started with chemistry sessions, rolled into discovery meetings that felt a bit like therapy, and eventually into the deep brand immersion we always do internally. Moodboards everywhere. A lot of questioning. A lot of pushing. Then, once we had the bones right, we built. A couple of months later we shared the first full build with Payal. It landed exactly as we hoped, the brand finally had a digital home that understood it. From there it was refinement, testing, polish. And yes, we collaborated closely with her team on creative direction, photography and content choices. That made a huge difference.
Collection Page
Beyond Launch: Challenges, Evolution and What Comes Next
Of course, there were challenges. Any fashion web build with this level of nuance will test platform limits. A few theme developers and app vendors had to fix or extend their own code to give us the functionality the brand deserved. That’s always a good sign, it means you’re pushing the experience beyond the off-the-shelf Shopify templates everyone else is using.
Most importantly, the site is designed to grow. Payal Khandwala’s world will evolve — new collections, new categories, new stories — so the system had to be flexible enough to evolve with it. Everything is structured so her team can maintain it long after we’ve stepped away. No unnecessary complexity. No dependence on hidden code.
A fashion web build designed to support the brand for years to come.
Lookbook
BACK TO WORK →
BACK TO WORK →