Luxury product website design for large collections: a complete guide

How our work for a specialist furniture designer is the perfect prototype for other premium firms looking for a tailored, large-scale digital product showcase.

Some of the most interesting experiences in my professional life happen when wildly divergent clients experience similar challenges. Invariably if we’ve completed a complex web brief for one, the new brief for another will be far more straightforward to solve.

The thing is, from rare wines to handcrafted furniture, luxury brands with large product ranges face a real challenge: how do you make a significant volume of high-quality (and potentially priced) product lines feel curated and special?

That was exactly the brief from Richard Taylor Designs, a long-established interiors specialist known for their exquisite lighting, mirrors and accessories. With a creaky website, their team needed a new online presence with muscle and finesse. The new design needed to showcase hundreds of pieces with often detailed permutations.

All this needed to feel clean, structured and quietly luxurious, whilst being easy to navigate, and simple to update without developer support. Here’s what we learned, and what brands with big, beautiful collections can take away from our experience.

1. Making a large collection feel curated

Because luxury should never feel cluttered

When you’re working with hundreds of products, especially pieces with custom finishes, detailed options or fine details, your website has to be more than just functional. It requires attitude, intent and a sense of formidable style.

For the Richard Taylor Designs project, we spent months with Richard and his team, going through every product one by one. We carefully figured out ways of explaining to their customers not just what they made but in many cases how they made it. Every product is made by hand and that kind of attention to craft had to be echoed in every part of the new site.

However, within our new branding, like all our work for interior design specialists, the design also had to be practical and functional. To do this, we built a modular design system that could scale naturally. We endeavoured to use imagery, type and the space around it confidently. In particular product photography was given room to shine in a way that it never been able to before.

Navigation remains intuitive, easily stretching between smaller sections such as ‘accessories’ as well as the comprehensive, multi-part lighting collection.

The key insight here is that customers reviewing high-value products expect to discover, not dig. Whether they’re browsing vintage French wines or handcrafted chandeliers, the site should feel like stepping through a beautifully curated tasting room or atelier, not hunting through a soulless database.

2. Build a back-end system your team will love

Because ongoing marketing shouldn’t rely on a developer

Fundamental to the success of this website long term was that both the product listings and new ‘journal’ feature had to be easy for the team to manage in-house. So, whether they were adding a new article, refining product feature details or preparing for a product launch, our content management system had to work for them.

One of the best ways of showing the potential of a site is by adding content with the client. Richard was highly specific about how the history and process of the company is set out. Rightly, he wants the story told as it happened, with every aspect of the story told in his voice. To achieve this, he sat beside me here in the studio, writing and editing every word.

As we did this, the new images he’d chosen and words that had been carefully crafted were visible live, in real time on our development site. For us, this is standard, for Richard and his team, it was a revolutionary relief. To date, updates to their previous site had always required an external IT provider. Suddenly they had a website with a back end that’s structured, intuitive and reliable. The sense of enthusiasm was palpable: suddenly there was less waiting, more doing, and finally real creative control.

For growing luxury brands, or established businesses stuck with old tech, this is game-changing. You can respond swiftly to ‘market moments’, update text seasonally, and guide the customer journey. More than anything, your business will have that intangible kismet of ‘feeling current.’

3. Let the products do the talking

Because great design is quiet, confident and clear

For a product-led website, the right photography is everything. Invariably the choice of images is up to our clients, their manufacturers or producers. Our responsibility is how your audience interacts with those images.

The most important pages in the site are the product detail portfolios. Richard Taylor Designs have a wide range of often highly ornate products and as a result, our layouts had to frame these images and let them breathe. The finished designs feel spacious and editorial. The use of text or product detail is all there, but secondary to the pictures, creating a deliberately unfussy visual tone.

However, we wanted to do something really special here and go deeper than just clean design. Inspired by Richard’s collection, we created hand-made drawings of the natural themes that run through his pieces. These include branches and leaves from the ‘oak branch’ chandeliers, pineapples from a range of wall lights or a dragonfly inspired by one of the ceramics in the collection. Our illustrations appear through the site, adding a charming, warm quality that reflects the products as well as containing them.

I believe that real craftsmanship lives in such details: the balance between the elements on a page, the softness of our colour palette which was picked from the product range or the way the choice of product finishes respond on mobile. These small things build trust, which is ultimately what luxury buyers are really buying into.

So much of a site like this is about emotion and gut feel, it goes so far beyond mere information. When the blend of user experience and product feels effortless and unique, that combination is the best sales tool there is.

Final thought

This project reflects something we care deeply about: how to make big product collections feel easy, beautiful and manageable online. For high-end or specialist brands, whether you’re presenting hundreds of wine vintages, limited edition rare books or handcrafted pieces like Richard Taylor Designs, that combination matters more than ever.

Every project we take on begins the same way: by listening and getting excited to provide exactly what our client, then their customers need. It was particularly true for this project: the right creative answer always comes from the brief and the people behind it.

This project was about creating a brand website experience that achieves four C’s: calm, confident, creative and compelling. A desirable catalogue for their customers browsing alongside an easy to manage sales tool for the team running it.

Planning a new website for your luxury collection?

Whether you’re working with fine wines, artisanal design or specialist rare goods like books or watches, we build digital platforms that show your products at their very best while concurrently providing your team the tools they need to ensure your business thrives.

We understand that authenticity and craft matter as much online as they do in person. Many of our clients require customisation where online purchasing isn’t possible, however we also design and deliver scalable luxury ecommerce websites which can interact with your stock-keeping software, that feel every bit as elegant as the products they showcase.

Call us on +44 20 7351 4083 or email us direct to start the conversation.

Find out more

Visit the Richard Taylor Designs website

Our portfolio page about the project

More of our work creating branding and web design for interior design specialists