Building e-commerce around the bundle, not the brand.

StartHub is a dropshipping e-commerce business with a clear thesis - that the office worker buying a single pen wants a workspace, not a pen. We built the brand, the storefront, and the merchandising logic around that bet.

StartHub

CLIENT

Lead Designer

ROLE

Brand, E-commerce, Merchandising Strategy

DELIVERABLES

2024

YEAR

OUTCOMES

2

Number of clicks from any homepage entry to the visitor-intent bundle.

3.4s

Average page load on the storefront, under sub-4s benchmark

4.1x

Average basket value modelled for bundle vs. single-item baseline

11

Lighthouse accessibility audit, full compliance pre-launch

01

The Problem

Dropshipping is a crowded category. Most stores compete on price and breadth, with thousands of SKUs and no editorial point of view. With StartHub, we had the opposite instinct: a curated catalogue of office supplies, sold primarily as industry-specific bundles - "THE BOSS", "THE ARCHITECT", "THE CREATOR". The challenge was making the bundle feel like the hero product, not a discount mechanic.

The site had to do three things at once: read as a coherent brand rather than a Shopify default, structure the catalogue around bundles without losing single-product browsability, and prepare a content pipeline that would actually drive search traffic in a category where most competitors don't write anything.

02

Approach & trade-offs

We treated the bundle as the primary product unit and the individual items as components. That sounds like a small shift; it changed every downstream decision.

I built the IA, brand and merchandising logic in parallel - not sequentially - because each one constrained the others. The brand had to feel premium enough to justify bundle pricing; the IA had to make bundles findable without burying singles; the merchandising had to balance both inventory and narrative.

"The bundle isn't a marketing layer on top of the catalogue. It is the catalogue. Single items exist to be discovered after the bundle has done its job — which is to sell a workspace, not a pen."

- JOE SAYERS, LEAD DESIGNER

03

Three decisions that shaped the flow

01 - Bundles as a primary nav item, not a category

Most e-commerce sites tuck "shop by collection" into a sub-menu. StartHub's nav reverses that: "The Bundles" sits as a top-level item, between Home and Products. The implicit message: bundles are not a marketing campaign, they're the way to shop here. Singles still exist, one click deeper, for the user who knows exactly what they want.

02 - Editorial bundle pages, not product grids

A bundle page isn't a list of items with a total. Each bundle gets a short editorial introduction ("THE DESIGNER — for their first day as a UX designer"), a hero shot of all items styled together, and only then the component breakdown. The bundle reads like a recommendation from someone who's thought it through, which is precisely what sets it apart from price-led competitors.

03 - A blog from day one, not "phase two"

Most dropship sites launch without a blog and never get around to it. We launched with the content scaffold in place — categories, tags, an initial cluster of three posts about workspace setup. SEO doesn't reward sites that pretend they sell products; it rewards sites that demonstrate domain authority. StartHub will rank for "best desk setup for new starters" within twelve months, not for "buy office supplies online" — and that's the right battle to fight.

04

The result

A storefront that reads as a curated brand, rather than a dropship outlet. Twelve bundles scoped and merchandised, a 60-product single-item catalogue underneath them, and a content engine ready to publish. The site is pre-launch — sales numbers will follow once the dropship partner activates — but the structural decisions are made and locked in.

05

Reflections

The honest gap in this project is that we built the merchandising logic before we had any sales data to validate it. The bundle compositions are educated guesses - informed by competitive scans and intent searches, but guesses. The first six months post-launch will be a data exercise, not a design one: tracking which bundles convert, which singles get added to bundles, and which never get touched. If I'd had the runway, I'd have built that analytics layer into the launch plan rather than leaving it for the founder to figure out. Next time, treat the post-launch dashboard as part of the design deliverable.