Simplified purchasing experience for retail customers
An e-commerce project aimed at both B2C and B2B customers. This project includes comprehensive purchasing processes that require the interface to be tailored to different user groups – an intuitive, simplified purchasing experience for retail customers, and optimized tools for placing large orders for business clients.
Type
Product Design
Context
Professional yacht chefs operate in high-pressure luxury environments, managing provisioning for multi-million dollar vessels while sourcing premium ingredients from extensive catalogs containing over 3,000 products across 100+ categories. These culinary professionals work primarily on mobile devices from cramped galleys, tender boats, and marina locations with varying connectivity conditions.
The business opportunity centered on creating a mobile-first B2B ordering platform that could streamline the complex provisioning process while maintaining the sophisticated aesthetic standards expected in the luxury yacht industry, aligning with premium brands like Petrossian and Fortnum & Mason that define this market segment.
Challenge
The primary challenge centered on making 3,000+ products discoverable on mobile screens without overwhelming users or sacrificing speed. Traditional e-commerce patterns break down when professional buyers need to rapidly locate specific premium ingredients while managing large, multi-category orders under time pressure.
Equally complex was designing for the luxury market while prioritizing utilitarian efficiency—the interface needed to convey premium quality and maintain credibility with high-net-worth clientele without introducing decorative elements that could slow task completion or compromise mobile usability.
Design
My design process began with competitive analysis across yacht provisioning competitors, luxury food retailers, and premium yacht brokerages, revealing a gap between functional B2B platforms with poor mobile experiences and beautifully designed luxury sites with limited ordering capabilities. I developed a two-screen architecture optimized for rapid context switching: a Product Catalog with category-first navigation and immediate quantity controls, and an Order Cart with category-based organization and swipe gestures for rapid adjustments.
The visual design balanced elegance with functionality through a dual-typography system pairing serifs for headers with sans-serifs for product information, a refined color palette of soft neutrals with strategic accent colors, and minimal line-based iconography. The breakthrough feature was the package bundling system—themed collections like "Sushi Essentials" that could be added with single interactions then customized, plus template saving for repeat orders, transforming time-intensive provisioning into efficient workflows.
Outcome
The platform is currently in active development and testing phases, with continuous iterations based on real user feedback from yacht chefs across Mediterranean and Caribbean markets. Early beta testing has shown promising results with significant improvements in order completion efficiency and user satisfaction scores. The design system and component library continue to evolve as we gather more insights from field testing in various maritime environments and connectivity conditions.
