A clearer, self-serve online store for a handmade cosmetics brand

Volviendo al Origen makes solid, handmade cosmetics in Aguascalientes, Mexico, and has sold them since 2012. Its website already had a recognizable artisanal identity, but the value proposition took too long to understand, several elements competed for attention and buying involved too many steps.

Much of the customer service was also manual: questions about shipping, payment methods and order status arrived one by one over WhatsApp.

We wrote a 25-page proposal: an audit of the current site, a new home page in eight sections, a content architecture, customer accounts, an order flow with six operational statuses, a 22-week schedule and the investment.

We also compared real options for customer chat, shipment tracking and Mexican payment gateways, with prices and a recommendation for each, so the client could decide with full information and no surprise third-party costs.

To approve the experience before investing in the final build, we built a navigable prototype with the real catalog:

• A shop with filters synced to the URL, and product pages with variants.
• A slide-out cart with coupons and a free-shipping meter.
• A two-step checkout with delivery or store pickup, and card, Mercado Pago, bank transfer or OXXO payment.
• Order tracking, customer accounts with order history and saved addresses, and an assistant that answers frequent questions.

• Next.js App Router: content pages render on the server; only interactive parts ship JavaScript.
• Cart, account and orders in Zustand with local persistence, loaded after hydration so server and browser HTML always match.
• Shop filters through the History API, without reloading the page.
• Accessibility: keyboard navigation, focus trapped in panels, a label on every field and AA contrast.
• 23 purchase flows tested with Playwright on desktop and mobile.

The client can walk through the whole store on a phone and validate every flow before committing to the final build. The prototype also works as a specification: colors, type, components and copy are already defined.