Sahana
- Location
- Byron Bay, Australia
- Industry
- Handwoven womenswear
- Platform
- Shopify
- Scope
- Store built from scratch: design, build, content structure
A Byron Bay label of hand-woven, hand-dyed pieces made in small numbered runs by master craftswomen in India. We built the store from scratch.
Visit the store
Capabilities proven here
Services behind this work Shopify development/Shopify theme development
The brief
Sahana's clothes take months to make. Every piece is hand-woven and hand-dyed in small numbered runs, and the brand exists to honour the women who make them as much as the women who wear them.
The store had to carry that story without slowing the sale: a place where the craft is felt on every page, and where finding your size and checking out is still effortless.
It also had to work beyond Byron Bay. The live store serves shoppers outside Australia with local currency and regional payment methods, so price, payment and delivery have to make sense wherever the shopper is.
Services & technology
- Store design and build
- Content and journal structure
- Collection and filter setup
- Product page and size guide
01Homepage
The craft, told before the catalogue.
The homepage opens on a moving film of the clothes being worn, with a single line: Clothing as Craft. Craft as Kinship. Below it, the story unfolds in chapters, from "20 Steps, Many Months, One Cloth" to customer stories and hand-loomed scarves and stoles.
Journal posts from the weavers' side, days at the loom and pieces nine months in the making, sit on the homepage too, so the story and the shop are one place.
02Collections & filtering
Seasonal collections with the story attached.
Each collection opens with its own short essay, like Unbound for the cooler months, then a grid with filters for size and price and a sort control. Sale pieces show the original and reduced price side by side.
03Product page
Size checkerShopify theme development
Fit and fibre, answered on the page.
The product page pairs a large editorial gallery with a "Check my size" guide right beside the size selector, so fit is settled before add to cart. Natural fibres and hand-made-by-artisans notes sit next to the price.
Description, shipping and a care guide are tucked into tidy tabs, and the page closes with Sahana's commitments on sustainability and social impact.
Fit settled before add to cart
A size checker sits right beside the size selector, so a shopper finds their size before they buy. Pick a measurement to see a suggestion.
Check my size
We suggest XSSMLXL
Size
An example size chart for illustration only. Not Sahana’s chart.
04Mobile
Editorial on a small screen too.
On a phone the film, the story chapters and the size guide all hold up, so the brand feels the same wherever a customer meets it.
What we did
A store built from scratch that carries Sahana's story on every page and keeps the path to purchase short.
- Story-led homepage with film, chapters and the journal
- Collections with their own essays, filtered by size and price
- Product pages with a size checker, fibre and care detail
Under the hood
International checkoutShopify development
What the live store is built from.
Sahana runs on the Broadcast theme, version 5.5, read from the live page source. The homepage is made of video-with-text, columns, rich text, reviews and journal sections, which is how the film, the story chapters and the weavers’ posts sit in one scroll. This is what is live in October 2026:
- The journal on the homepage. A blog section brings the latest journal posts onto the homepage, so the story and the shop are one place.
- International checkout. On our visit from New Zealand prices were shown in New Zealand dollars, and the footer lists Shop Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal and the major cards, along with regional methods such as Bancontact.
- Email, chat and offers. Klaviyo for email, Gorgias live chat, Klarna messaging and an upsell and bundle-offer app are loaded on the live store.
- Variant-level product data. Product pages output Product schema with one Offer per variant, each with its own SKU and price, so availability is readable variant by variant.
Measured today
Checked on 3 October 2026.
We re-read the live store and Google’s real-visitor data on 3 October 2026. These figures describe the store as it runs today, including any apps and changes made since our build.
- Real visitors (Google Chrome UX Report, whole store, phones, 75th percentile, 28 days to 3 Oct 2026): Largest Contentful Paint 1.8 s, inside Google’s “good” threshold, so real shoppers see the main content quickly.
For similar merchants
Telling a slow story on a fast store.
Layout shift is the other number to watch on story-led stores. Chat widgets, pop-ups and late-loading banners can push content around after the page has drawn, which real visitors notice even when a lab test does not.
Neither changes the approach. Lead with the craft, keep size and fibre answered on the product page, and measure what real visitors experience, not just the lab.
Questions
Does video on a Shopify homepage slow the store down?
It adds weight, often more than everything else on the page combined. Real visitors can still see the main content quickly if the video loads after it, but a phone-sized encode, a shorter loop and lazy loading for videos further down the page all help.
What causes layout shift on a Shopify store?
Usually content that loads late and pushes the page around: chat widgets, pop-ups, announcement banners, review widgets and images without fixed dimensions. Google measures it from real visitors, so it can show up in field data even when a lab test reads zero.
Related case studies
All work
Organic clothingWorld of Crow Colour, pattern and length filters on a quiet, fast store, inside Google’s good Core Web Vitals range for real mobile visitors.
Multi-designer boutiqueStory of India Designer-led collections, size guides, a wishlist and a currency converter for international shoppers.
Leather bagsRömfre A mobile-first store with quick add from the collection grid and local pickup shown on the product page.