Designing a luxury skincare E-Commerce with zero photography budget
Premium skincare customers don't browse by price - they browse by concern.
Services
E-commerce UX/UI, Webdesign, Visual identity, Midjourney / AI
Date
2025
$180 for a serum, from a brand nobody has heard of.
I designed a full e-commerce experience for a luxury botanical brand, exploring how skin-type-first navigation and trust signals at key decision points can justify $150–200 price points. Every product image was generated with Midjourney using a production-level prompting workflow - no photography budget, no stock photos, no compromises on quality.
The whole project runs on one question: what makes someone comfortable spending $180 on a serum from a brand they've never heard of? Premium skincare customers don't browse by price - they browse by concern. So every page in the journey has a job. The homepage builds credibility, the category page helps you find your match, the product page justifies the price, and the cart removes reasons to hesitate.
Three decisions that carry the price tag
Trust isn't a badge you add at the end. It's built at the three moments where a first-time customer decides whether to keep going.
Horizontal Skin-Type filters on category pages
Category pages use standard product-type navigation - moisturizers, serums, cleansers. But once a customer lands in a category, the next question isn't 'sort by price' - it's 'which of these is right for my skin?' I added horizontal filters by skin type at the top of the product grid, letting users narrow results in one tap without leaving the page. It's a small interaction pattern that shifts the experience from browsing a catalog to getting a recommendation.
Trust signals where hesitation happens
At $48–180 price points, customers need reassurance before they click 'Add to Cart.' I placed four trust badges directly below the cart button - visible without scrolling, exactly where hesitation happens. For deeper product knowledge, I used accordion sections. This keeps the page clean for quick buyers while giving cautious customers a way to dig deeper without leaving. 'Botanical Origins' and 'Application Ritual' aren't standard e-commerce patterns - they're borrowed from luxury brand storytelling to reinforce that this isn't just another moisturizer.
Two-Step cart - Drawer for momentum, Full Page for commitment
Instead of one cart experience, I designed two. The slide-out cart drawer appears immediately after adding a product. It's designed for momentum: don't interrupt the flow, give a reason to add more. The full cart page serves a different purpose - it's where committed buyers review everything - itemized costs, shipping and VAT breakdown, and a discount code field. Two different mental states, two different interfaces.
AI asset pipeline - Midjourney to brand system
All product imagery was generated with Midjourney. Not as a shortcut - as a deliberate production workflow.
Started with 3–4 reference images to lock the aesthetic: lighting quality, color temperature, botanical-meets-clinical mood.
Built prompts with camera specs - lens type, focal length, lighting setup. Generic prompts produce generic results. Technical prompts produce controllable, commercial-quality output.
Used one strong output as style reference for all subsequent generations. This is what creates visual consistency across a product line - without it, every image looks like a different photographer shot it.
Exported to ChatGPT image generation for label typography. Midjourney struggles with text; knowing which tool handles which task is part of the craft.
What I'd test
If this were a real product, here's what I'd validate first:
Is ingredient story above the fold more effective than leading with social proof?
How does the full journey hold up on mobile, where luxury skincare discovery skews heavily?
Thanks for reading
Want to discuss e-commerce UX or AI-generated brand assets?
VeraBotanica is a concept project. Brand, products, and pricing are fictional. The strategic thinking, UX decisions, and AI asset workflow are real and reflect how I approach luxury e-commerce design.
