laurent badier

A gallery-like e-commerce experience for a French design furniture brand

problem

Laurent Badier reissues a humble, instantly familiar object — the old French school chair — and sells it as a premium, made-to-order design piece at a designer price point. That creates a real tension for the online experience: how do you make an everyday object feel desirable and worth its price, on a small catalogue, without the store reading like a generic shop? On top of that, customization is the brand's core selling point but a common source of friction, and the same store has to serve both individual buyers and professional resellers — two audiences with very different intentions.

solution

I designed the experience to feel like a showroom rather than a catalogue. The landing reads as a vertical narrative — hero, categories, the designer's story, the brand's commitments, its international presence — so a small collection feels curated and intentional, and the premium positioning is carried by the layout itself, not just the prices. On the product page, I sequenced the journey to match how people actually decide: the visual and the buying choices first (color, set size, customization, price), then the product story, then the piece shown in a real interior, then related items — so a visitor can buy in seconds or keep scrolling to be convinced. Customization sits directly in the purchase block instead of behind an extra step, putting the brand's key differentiator front and center. And a clear professional/reseller entry point routes B2B buyers without diluting the consumer experience.

Laurent Badier started from an unlikely object: the old French school chair everyone grew up with. The designer took that piece of shared memory and reissued it as something crafted and contemporary — the Les Adulescentes collection — built in recycled steel and acrylic, made in France, and turned from a forgettable classroom object into a desirable design piece. It's a brand that runs on nostalgia made premium: familiar enough to feel personal, refined enough to belong in a design-conscious home.

My job was to give that idea a home online. The brand identity, the products, and the photography already existed — what was missing was an experience that carried the same intent. This was a school project, but with a real client and a real brief: Laurent Badier needed to reach his audiences more effectively, including internationally, and the existing presence wasn't doing that work. The goal was an experience as considered as the objects it sold, built to speak to design-minded buyers in Paris as much as in New York or Tokyo.

So I designed the experience around one principle: treat the catalogue like a collection, not a shelf. Every decision — the editorial landing, the way products are introduced, the customization placed at the heart of the purchase, the bilingual and internationally-minded framing — was meant to make a small, focused range feel curated and worth its price, while keeping the path to buying effortless. The result is a store that behaves less like a shop and more like a showroom you can browse, get drawn into, and buy from.

year

2024

timeframe

1 month

tools

Figma