When the world's most luxurious skincare brand couldn't match its own in-store experience online
Worked with La Prairie (one of the world’s most luxurious skincare product brands) to revamp their digital retail strategy across all their digital channels - specifically focused on driving on-line conversion by transitioning to a customer first experience (from an item lead experience). Currently partnering with them to develop the 2023-24 roadmap across all digital touch points.
THE CHALLENGE
La Prairie's in-store experience is considered among the finest in luxury retail. Trained consultants. Personalised skin assessments. Products presented as the result of decades of Swiss scientific research. Customers leave feeling genuinely seen and cared for.
The digital experience offered none of that.
Basket creation rates were significantly below target. Returning customers — La Prairie's most valuable segment — weren't being served differently from first-time visitors. The bespoke consultation service existed online but was buried so deeply in the journey that almost no one found it. And the navigation was organised around collections, which meant customers who thought in terms of their skin concerns — dryness, ageing, sensitivity — had no intuitive path to the right products.
The gap between the in-store and digital experience wasn't just a UX problem. It was a business problem. And it was costing La Prairie commercially.
MY ROLE
I was UX Director on this engagement — leading a team of UX and UI designers alongside content partners, and working directly with La Prairie's Head of Global Digital Operations. I directed the end-to-end experience strategy: from research and persona development through to redesigning every major surface of the digital product — homepage, navigation, product listing pages, consultation entry points, and the festive shopping experience.
THE STRATEGIC SHIFT - FROM ITEM-LED TO CUSTOMER-FIRST
The most important decision we made wasn't a design decision. It was a strategic one: La Prairie's digital experience needed to stop organising itself around its products and start organising itself around its customers.
In-store, a customer never browses by collection. They tell a consultant what their skin needs — hydration, brightening, anti-ageing — and the consultant does the work of connecting them to the right product. The digital experience had never been designed to replicate that. It assumed customers already knew what they wanted and just needed help finding it.
Our research — built on La Prairie's existing customer data, then validated and extended through workshops with their team — showed clearly that customers didn't think in collections. They thought in skin concerns, skin types, age groups, and rituals. The personas we built across these dimensions became the foundation for every subsequent design decision.
La Prairie's team told us they were the most accurate representation of their customer base they'd seen, and used them to improve how they serviced customers beyond the digital product.
Analysing the research done across multiple geographies for what various skin needs were
Benchmarking bespoke entry points and live chat
WHAT WE REDESIGNED
The skin type browsing journey replaced collections as the primary navigation logic — allowing customers to find products through what their skin needed rather than what La Prairie had named a product range. We redesigned the full navigation across PLP, CLP, and sticky elements to support this shift without losing the brand's sense of luxury and curation.
The bespoke consultation service was repositioned significantly earlier in the customer journey — reframed not as a support function but as a premium service, properly differentiated for existing versus new customers. Adoption increased meaningfully after the repositioning.
The homepage was redesigned to lead with engagement — surfacing the science, the rituals, and the brand story as active pathways rather than passive content. The festive shopping experience was built as a distinct seasonal journey within the same system, designed for gift purchasers whose needs and behaviours differed entirely from La Prairie's core skincare customer.
Redesigning the navigation experience
IMPACT
La Prairie held their performance data closely — standard practice for a brand of this exclusivity. What they did share: conversion improved by 12% following the redesign.
Returning customers began coming back more frequently — the gap between visits, which had previously stretched to months, shortened measurably.
Homepage engagement increased significantly. And the client asked us to become their thought partner for the 2023–24 roadmap — a strategic relationship covering the UK and EU markets, focused on homepage evolution, navigation refinement, and festive commerce.
That last point is the one I point to most. La Prairie doesn't extend strategic partnerships lightly.
