+192% online sales in the first month on the new website
How we rebuilt So You! Boutique on Shopify around Debbie's colour expertise, so women can shop by their colour season and book her services online.
So You! Boutique
So You! is a women's fashion boutique in Rangiora, open for over 13 years and carrying sizes 6 to 26. Owner Debbie Albrecht has been an image consultant and colour analyst for over 20 years. Most of her customers are 40+, and many come in for her colour and styling know-how, not just the clothes.
Her Best Work Was Invisible Online
Debbie's colour and styling expertise is the reason most customers walk through the door, but none of that showed up on the website. Colours Plus, her signature colour analysis, had no page at all: the link redirected to the events page. Workshop tickets were phone-only. There was no way to book a styling session online, and the Clothing Personality Quiz could not be bought. The site was also slow and heavy. The homepage weighed about 35 MB on mobile, with 190 requests and more than 6,000 page elements, including a full HD silent hero video and a currency picker listing over 200 countries for a shop whose customers are mostly local. Underneath that sat the basics: no H1 on the homepage, keyword-stuffed collection URLs (one with a typo, shop-onine), an empty FAQ page, duplicate menu items and thousands of product images with no alt text. There was a technical catch too. Lightspeed X-Series runs the till in store and is the master for product data, and it overwrites Shopify on every change. Anything written straight into Shopify would be wiped by the next stock update. And Debbie describes herself as technically challenged, so whatever we built had to be simple enough that she would actually use it.
We Built the Shop Around Her Colour Seasons
Debbie uses the four-season colour system. Once a woman knows whether she is a Spring, Summer, Autumn or Winter, she knows which colours make her glow, and her customers already shop that way in store. So we made the website work the same way.
Every colourway of every product is tagged with the seasons it suits. A Winter can tick Winter and see only the pieces in colours that work on her, plus the universal colours such as melon, teal, cobalt, off-white and dark denim that suit everyone. Seasons sit on the colour, not the product, so a top that comes in coral and navy is Spring and Autumn in coral and Winter in navy. When a colour sells out, that season drops off the product automatically through an hourly job.
The piece that makes it hold together is the Season Checker. Rather than ask Debbie to edit Shopify, we built her a one-page tool: a photo of each colour, tap the seasons that suit it, done. She checked 880 colours in her first two days. A script then compares her answers with our original tags and turns the patterns into rules. She made navy Winter 24 times out of 37, put gold with Spring and Autumn 104 times out of 109, and read most blues and pinks as Summer. Those rules now tag new stock her way and correct colours she has not reached yet, so she fixes less each time. Anything she has ticked is never overwritten.
What we built:
- A custom Shopify theme. Online Store 2.0, fully editable by our team, in a new brand system of navy, cream, blush and rose. New pages for Colours Plus, Personal Styling, What's my season?, the 12 Piece Pack, Events, Visit Us, Delivery and Returns, a size guide with label charts for 10 brands, and a real FAQ.
- A homepage that loads. The hero video and the 200-country currency picker went, apps were trimmed, and the homepage dropped from about 35 MB to 2.7 MB on mobile.
- Services sold online for the first time. Appointo booking for Colours Plus and Personal Styling with alerts straight to Debbie, workshop tickets as products so seats left update from stock, and the Clothing Personality Quiz sold at $14.95 instead of the old VideoAsk version.
- Product descriptions written for her, in her voice. An AI writer reads the product photo and whatever Debbie has already put in Lightspeed, including her own warm tone and cool tone labels, which always win. It writes a two-paragraph description, a styling tip, detail bullets, an SEO title, a meta description, alt text and the season for each colourway. It is trained on her rules, down to banned words such as elevate, must-have and timeless piece, and every draft is checked against the photo before it goes live.
- A build that works with the sync, not against it. Descriptions were imported into Lightspeed itself in four batches, so the sync keeps them. Seasons, SEO fields and alt text live in Shopify fields the Lightspeed sync does not touch.
- Forty-three rebranded emails. Every Shopify notification redesigned in the So You! brand, including a shipping email with a photo of Angela, Debbie and Sue wrapping an order at the counter, and separate wording for digital orders so a voucher or a booking does not get told it is on its way.
The point of difference is that this needs a colour analyst behind it. The system learns Debbie's judgement rather than a generic colour chart, which is not something most boutiques can offer.
A Boutique That Sells Its Expertise, Not Just Its Stock
In the first month on the new site, compared with the month before, online sales rose 192% and online orders rose 250%, with 45% of orders coming from returning customers. The relaunch newsletter had a 50% open rate and a 33% click rate, Debbie's best yet. The new site went live on 12 October 2026 with every link, redirect, sitemap entry and the checkout tested. The homepage is about 92% lighter on mobile. Over 600 product descriptions, written in Debbie's voice and fact-checked against the photos, were live in the first week, along with 2,264 image alt texts. Colours Plus appointments, styling sessions, workshop seats and the quiz can all be bought online for the first time. For Debbie, the change is in what she no longer has to do. She adds stock to Lightspeed the way she always has and the descriptions write themselves. The team has stopped emailing every online customer by hand. Seasons stay current without her editing the website: she taps to correct, and the system learns.
"A huge thank you to Liv and the Digital Influence team for doing such an amazing job on our new So You! Boutique website. I absolutely love it, and I'm so grateful. It looks beautiful, the photos are so much cleaner, and our customers noticed straight away. One told me on the very first night how easy it is to move around. The part that amazed me most is the product descriptions. I just pop in a few basic details when new stock arrives and the website writes lovely descriptions in my own voice, so I won't need my Grammarly subscription any more and I can spend that time with my customers. The new emails look fabulous too, and the girls no longer have to email every online customer by hand to say thank you. Best of all, women can now book their Colours Plus and styling sessions online and shop by their colour season, which is exactly what So You! is all about."
See what we made
Loyalty and email marketing
Next we're setting up Marsello, her loyalty and marketing platform: branding it to match the new site and switching abandoned cart recovery back on, which has recovered $7,829 for So You! in the past.
