WOOOBA SPORT INC. · OBERLIN, OHIO
Bead Paradise has been part of downtown Oberlin since 1987 — longer than most of the internet. We're an Oberlin company too, and we've long admired what Ruth has built: a shop where every bead has a place of origin, a period, and a story.
Your website already does something rare — it puts thousands of genuinely one-of-a-kind pieces online, updated weekly. What it doesn't yet do is feel like the shop. This proposal is our plan to close that gap, and it comes with a working example: alongside this document you'll find a full homepage concept, built with your real inventory and photography, that you can open in any browser right now.
We reviewed the current site page by page. In plain terms:
| Today | What a visitor experiences | What we'd do |
|---|---|---|
| Dated theme | A circa-2013 Shopify template that undersells museum-grade inventory; small photos, cramped grids. | A custom look built around large, gallery-style photography. |
| Navigation overload | The menu lists 100+ links; the homepage ends in a tag cloud of ~700 links. New visitors don't know where to start. | Six clear doors in: Materials, Regions, Jewelry, New arrivals, Story, Visit. The full index survives — one level down. |
| Buried story | "Established 1987" and Ruth's curation appear as a single line under the products. | A dedicated story band and About page — provenance is why collectors pay for antique beads. |
| Mobile | The layout is desktop-first; on a phone the tag cloud and menus dominate. | Designed phone-first — where most first-time visitors from Instagram and search arrive. |
| Email capture | "Sign up for updates!" with no reason given. | "New listings every week — see them first." A reason tied to how you already operate. |
| Trust & visit info | Hours, shows, refund policy and the shop's location are scattered across footer links. | A single Visit section: location, hours, upcoming bead shows, socials. |
The enclosed homepage concept shows this direction with your live inventory. A few things to look for when you open it:
A working session with Ruth at the shop; review of sales data, best-selling collections, and search analytics; photography audit; sitemap and collection structure agreed on paper before any code.
Deliverables: sitemap, content plan, photography guide, redirect map.
Full designs for homepage, collection, product, story, and visit pages — desktop and phone — iterated with you in weekly reviews. The enclosed concept is the starting point, not the finish line.
Deliverables: complete page designs, style guide (color, type, photo treatment).
A custom Shopify theme built to the designs; restructured collections and navigation; product template with provenance fields (origin, period, material, size); 301 redirects for every existing URL; speed and mobile checks; a recorded walkthrough so your team can manage everything without us.
Deliverables: live site, training video, 30 days of post-launch support included.
Three ways to work together, sized to different appetites. Figures are indicative and open to discussion — we'd rather fit the work to your goals than the other way around.
WOOOBA Sport Inc. is an Oberlin, Ohio design and development studio. We build and operate our own subscription sports platform (woooba.io) — used by real communities every week — and we design websites and mobile apps for clients who want their online presence to feel as considered as their real one. Because we run our own commerce platform, we design for the metrics that matter to an owner: repeat visits, email growth, and sales — not just looks.
Open the enclosed homepage concept, click around, and tell us what feels right and what doesn't. Then let's walk through it together — at the shop, over coffee. If it's a fit, we can begin Phase I within two weeks.
Prepared exclusively for Bead Paradise. Product photography shown in the enclosed concept remains © Bead Paradise and is used solely to illustrate the proposed design. Pricing indicative; a formal statement of work follows acceptance.