Heather B. Moore: Bringing an artisan's world of thousands of one-of-a-kind pieces into focus online

A fine jewelry brand beloved in person. A catalog of thousands of one-of-a-kind pieces. A website that couldn't hold either. Here's how we rebuilt heatherbmoore.com from the merchandising architecture up — and what every fine jewelry brand can learn from it.

The Brand

Some jewelry brands sell products. Heather B. Moore sells memory.

Founded in Cleveland, Ohio, and woman-owned from day one, Heather B. Moore is one of the most distinctive names in American fine jewelry. Every piece is handmade by in-house artisans using custom steel stamps — many of the tools crafted by the studio itself. A charm might carry a child's name, a mother's handwriting, a fingerprint, a date, a coordinate, a phrase that means nothing to strangers and everything to the person wearing it. Customers don't buy a Heather B. Moore piece for a season. They buy it for a lifetime, and then they hand it down.

That devotion built a loyal collector base and a thriving retail and trade presence. It also built something else: a catalog of thousands of SKUs. Charms in every shape, theme, and metal. Frames — original, wide, channel set, unframed. Fonts. Enamel colors. Gemstones. Chains, accent chains, hinge chains. Cuffs, bangles, charming bracelets. Hinges, loops, set bars, ID tags. Nearly every piece customizable, and many made to order.

In the studio, that abundance is the magic. Online, it had become the problem.

The Challenge

When Heather B. Moore came to Exhibea, the brief was deceptively simple: redesign and reimagine heatherbmoore.com into a beautifully functional shopping experience — one that would deepen engagement, bring customers back, and convert.

Underneath that brief sat three harder problems.

First, the catalog was overwhelming the customer. Thousands of products, each with its own variations of font, color, theme, metal, and frame, meant that shoppers couldn't see the forest for the trees. A first-time visitor landing on the site had no way to grasp, in the first thirty seconds, what Heather B. Moore actually makes and why it's unlike anything else. The brand's greatest asset — its depth — was reading as chaos.

Second, the story was getting lost. Handmade by in-house artisans. Custom steel stamps. Woman-owned. Cleveland, Ohio. Tools crafted in-house. These are the facts that separate an heirloom from an accessory, and they were nowhere near the center of the experience. Customers who met the brand in person — at a trunk show, in a store, through a friend's necklace — understood immediately. Customers who met the brand through a browser did not.

third, customization — the very soul of the brand — was buried. The thing Heather B. Moore does that no one else in the world can do was treated like an afterthought in the shopping flow, rather than the signature moment it deserved to be.

Our mission, as we wrote in the original proposal: give customers the feeling that they are immersed in a brand connected to a mission and greater purpose — and make shoppers feel as confident purchasing online as they would in-store.

The Approach

1. Before designing a single page, we edited

Most agencies start a redesign in Figma. We started in the catalog.

Working side by side with the Heather B. Moore team, we went through the assortment piece by piece — thousands of charms, chains, bracelets, rings, earrings, and components — and asked the merchandising questions that a great salesperson answers instinctively on the studio floor: What is this? Who is it for? What goes with it? What story does it tell?

Out of that editing process came a completely new merchandising architecture, organized around how customers actually shop for meaningful jewelry:

• By meaning. Family. Pets. Mom. Baby. Friendship. Love and marriage. Location and memory. Inspirational. The charm categories were rebuilt around the stories people want to tell, not internal product codes.
• By collection narrative. Bridal Moments. Endless Love. Milestones & Memories. Cherished Companions. Family Ties. Childhood Magic. Handstamped Treasures. Each collection became a small world with its own emotional throughline.
• By occasion. Engagement, wedding, anniversary, new baby, graduation, birthday, holidays, date night — because an enormous share of fine jewelry purchases begin with a calendar, not a category.
• By category and component. Charms, chains (standard, accent, hinge), bracelets (cuffs, bangles, chain, charming, hinge), earrings (huggies, hinge, drop, bezel, stone), rings (personalized and ready-to-ship), ID tags, set bars, hinges and loops — each clarified so a collector building a piece knows exactly what each component does.
• By stone. Gemstones organized and told through what they represent — energy, meaning, healing — turning a filter into a storytelling layer.
• By price and readiness. Curated gift guides by budget, plus a clear split between made-to-order personalization and ready-to-ship pieces.

This is the least glamorous part of a luxury redesign and the most important one. A beautiful site built on a confusing catalog is a beautiful confusion. Editing is a design act.

2. Navigation built for discovery, not endurance

With the architecture in place, we rebuilt the way customers move through it: a streamlined, mobile-first navigation with a considered mega menu that presents the brand's worlds at a glance; sophisticated search; and layered filtering by material, metal color, gemstone, occasion, customization options, frame type, and price.

The measure of success we designed against: a shopper should be able to go from "thousands of products" to "the piece that's mine" in a few taps — and enjoy every tap along the way. Collection pages were rebuilt to guide browsing with editorial moments and featured tiles, so moving through the catalog feels like being walked through the studio by someone who knows where everything is.

3. Customization became the signature moment

Personalization is Heather B. Moore's superpower, so we moved it from the periphery to the center of the experience.

We designed a user-friendly, mobile-optimized customization experience that lets customers create their own pieces — choosing charms, stamps, fonts, frames, metals, and gemstones — with clear, guided paths for monograms, names and dates, handwriting, fingerprints, and fully custom stamps. Because these are heirlooms, not t-shirts, we built in an approval step for custom designs: every one-of-a-kind piece is confirmed before it goes to the bench, protecting both the customer's heart and the studio's time.

Around the customizer, we merchandised the brand's component system — gemstone add-ons, loops, hinges, accent chains — as natural extensions of a piece rather than upsell clutter. The result mirrors how collectors actually build a Heather B. Moore piece over time: charm by charm, story by story.

4. We gave the brand a persona, not just a palette

A major thread of the engagement was developing the Heather B. Moore persona across the site — the voice, imagery, and emotional register of the brand, expressed consistently from homepage to product page to packaging insert.

We wove the founder's story and the studio's craft into the funnel itself: the heritage of a brand whose journey begins with love, laughter, and family; the in-house artisans and custom steel stamps; the Cleveland studio; the line's purpose of documenting a person's story, letting the wearer remember what shaped them along the way. Emotive storytelling modules, lookbooks, customer stories, and reviews were designed as first-class citizens of the experience — because for this brand, the customer's own story is the product.

We also committed to editorial content that lives on-site only, giving collectors a reason to return between purchases. A fine jewelry site should be worth visiting even on the days you're not buying — that's how a store becomes a destination.

5. Conversion craft, everywhere

Immersion and performance are not in tension — that's a founding belief at Exhibea, and this project proves it. Throughout the experience we engineered the levers that move conversion, average order value, and units per transaction in fine jewelry:

• Curated gift guides by occasion, recipient, and price point — making the site as easy to gift from as it is to collect from.
• "Complete the look" suggestions on product pages and upsells in the mini cart, pairing charms with chains, hinges, and stones the way the studio intends them to be worn.
• Curated bundles that turn popular combinations into one-of-a-kind gifts.
• Detailed product education — sizing, materials, customization options, care tutorials — because at heirloom price points, confidence is the conversion rate.
• Premium editorial photography and video direction for high-value pieces, showing jewelry in motion and on the body, closing the gap between screen and skin.

The design system itself was built modular and flexible — capable of giving hero, brand-defining pieces their gallery moment while handling evergreen styles efficiently, and flexing with seasonality.

6. Built properly, handed over completely

Under the surface: a site developed to WCAG 2.2 accessibility standards with an accompanying accessibility statement; page-by-page SEO optimization across titles, URLs, keywords, and metadata; unique content written for key pages; progressive enhancement for cross-browser longevity; and integration with the brand's marketing stack, including Klaviyo.

We also redesigned and developed the brand's wholesale portal with login capabilities — extending the new brand world to the trade partners who have carried Heather B. Moore for years.

And then we did the thing we believe separates a partner from a vendor: we put the brand in the driver's seat. Toolkits, guidelines, and hands-on training gave the Heather B. Moore team everything needed to launch collections, build landing pages, and keep the site as elegant and functional as the day it launched. The project was delivered on a focused 12–16 week timeline from kickoff to launch.

The Results

The new heatherbmoore.com does what the studio floor has always done: it makes you understand, within moments, that you're somewhere singular — and then it makes it effortless to take a piece of that world home.

The engagement was designed against hard KPI targets across conversion rate, average order value, and units per transaction. [Insert verified post-launch metrics here — e.g., conversion rate lift, AOV lift, engagement/time-on-site, repeat purchase rate. Publish only numbers confirmed in analytics.]

Beyond the metrics, the transformation is structural. The brand now has a merchandising architecture that scales with its creativity — every new charm, stamp, and collection has an obvious home. Customization sits at the center of the experience, where it belongs. And the story that once required an in-person visit to understand now greets every visitor in the first scroll.

What Fine Jewelry Brands Can Take From This

Depth is only an asset when it's legible. If your catalog is your pride, curation is your first design project. Edit before you design.

Organize around meaning, not inventory. Customers shopping for heirloom jewelry think in occasions, people, and stories. Your taxonomy should too.

Put your superpower at the center. Whatever only you can do — customization, provenance, craft — should be the signature moment of your site, not a footnote.

Trust is the conversion rate. At fine jewelry price points, education, transparency, storytelling, and polish do the selling. Every detail either builds confidence or erodes it.

A site should be worth visiting between purchases. Editorial content, stories, and discovery turn a checkout into a destination — and destinations create collectors.

Exhibea is a luxury ecommerce design and development agency in Los Angeles, specializing in Shopify and Shopify Plus for fashion, fine jewelry, and lifestyle brands including Sporty & Rich, Cult Gaia, Retrouvaí, Phillips House, and Heather B. Moore. If your brand's world deserves better than its website, let's talk: exhibea.com.