B2B e-commerce · 2023
Selling certainty in a trade built on trust
Brand site and platform experience for a B2B sourcing marketplace for natural and lab-grown diamonds and bespoke jewellery — where a single order can be worth a retailer's month.
Role
Founding UX Designer — web, brand & platform
Timeline
2023–2024
Team
1 designer · engineering team · founders
Platform
Web — brand site & B2B platform
€1M → €4M
Revenue scaled during tenure
~60%
Checkout time cut in redesign
4
Product verticals designed
01 · Overview
Artisan Jewels sources natural and lab-grown diamonds and bespoke jewellery for trade buyers — retailers and jewellers making five-figure purchasing decisions from a screen. The product has to carry the weight of a handshake business moving online.
As founding designer I owned the brand site and the platform experience end to end — from visual identity and trust architecture to the stone-browsing, enquiry and checkout flows, across four product verticals.
02 · The Problem
What we were trying to solve
Trade buyers were being served consumer-style jewellery sites: emotional imagery, thin specs, enquiry forms that vanished into inboxes. Professionals buying by certificate, cut and margin had no efficient way to evaluate inventory — and no reason to trust a new platform with serious money.
Pain point 01
Spec-blind browsing
Buyers filter by certificate, carat, cut, clarity and price-per-carat — consumer-style galleries made professional evaluation painfully slow.
Pain point 02
Trust had no interface
Certificates, provenance and company credentials were buried or absent — fatal when a first order can be tens of thousands of euros.
Pain point 03
Checkout built for gifts, not trade
Long consumer checkout flows with no reorder support ignored how trade buyers actually purchase: repeatedly, in bulk, against margins.
03 · Research
What the users taught us
I interviewed trade buyers and the sales team, analysed session recordings and funnel data, and audited how established B2B stone marketplaces structured search, specs and trust signals.
Buyers scan tables, not galleries
Professionals compare stones in dense, sortable spec views — the gallery aesthetic that sells engagement rings slows down someone buying twenty stones.
The certificate is the product
GIA/IGI certification drove decisions more than photography — surfacing certificates at every level of the browse-to-buy journey was non-negotiable.
Checkout friction compounds in B2B
A buyer purchasing weekly feels every redundant field forty times a year — funnel data showed exactly where repeat buyers were stalling.
04 · Design Process
From tangled problem to shipped solution
Stage 1 — Problem Identified
A consumer skin on a trade business
Funnel data and buyer interviews converged: the experience was optimised for browsing, but the business ran on professional evaluation and repeat purchase. The mismatch showed up as stalled carts and enquiry drop-offs.
Stage 2 — Problem Scoping
Trust first, speed second
We sequenced the work: establish credibility (brand site, certification surfacing, provenance) before optimising conversion (browse, checkout). A trustworthy slow site beats a fast dubious one in this trade.
- Four verticals mapped: natural, lab-grown, bespoke, wholesale
- Checkout redesign scoped against real repeat-buyer behaviour
Stage 3 — Solution Shaping
Designing the professional's view
Spec-first browsing with dense sortable views, certificate badges at card level, and a checkout rebuilt around trade behaviour — saved details, reorder paths, and enquiry flows that route to a named person, not a void.
Stage 4 — Impact Testing
Measured against the funnel
Each release was validated against analytics and buyer feedback. The rebuilt checkout cut completion time by roughly 60%, and enquiry-to-response flows were iterated with the sales team until leads stopped leaking.
- Checkout timing measured pre/post redesign
- Session recordings reviewed on every major release
Stage 5 — Solution Deployed
A platform that scaled with the business
The redesigned experience shipped across all four verticals as revenue scaled from €1M to €4M — with design foundations that let new inventory types launch without rethinking the system.
05 · The Solution
The decisions that shaped it
The shipped experience treats trade buyers as professionals: evaluate fast, verify everything, reorder in moments — wrapped in a brand that looks like somewhere you'd wire five figures.
Decision 01
Spec-first stone browsing
Dense, sortable, filterable views built around the 4Cs, certification and price-per-carat — evaluation at the speed buyers work, with photography supporting rather than leading.
Decision 02
Certification as a first-class element
GIA/IGI badges on every card, certificates one click deep, provenance woven through product pages — trust signals placed where decisions actually happen.
Decision 03
Checkout rebuilt for repeat trade
The redesigned flow cut checkout time ~60%: fewer fields, saved business details, and reorder paths that turn a weekly purchase into a two-minute task.
Decision 04
A brand that carries the handshake
Restrained, credible visual identity across the site — typography, photography direction and copy tuned to a trade audience that distrusts anything too flashy.
06 · Impact
What changed
Design became a growth lever: the experience scaled with the business as revenue quadrupled.
€1M → €4M
Revenue during tenure
~60%
Faster checkout completion
4
Verticals on one design foundation
- Checkout redesign directly lifted conversion — completion time down ~60% with measurably fewer abandoned carts.
- Certification-forward design gave the sales team a credibility asset that shortened trust-building with new buyers.
- One design system stretched across natural, lab-grown, bespoke and wholesale without fragmenting.
- Acting as primary business analyst kept design, requirements and engineering aligned through rapid scaling.
07 · Learnings
What I'm taking with me
- 01
B2B is not consumer with bigger numbers — density, verification and repeat-purchase speed beat visual seduction every time.
- 02
Trust is an information architecture problem: where a certificate appears matters as much as that it exists.
- 03
Wearing the BA hat made designs land as built — writing the user stories myself closed the gap between intent and implementation.