Background
BSD Haus is a Los Angeles-based design-build studio. Over years of working on renovation projects, they developed something most studios never do: direct relationships with manufacturers and a refined point of view on materials. That expertise became the foundation for a vertically sourced collection of tile and hard goods, curated by people who actually install and specify these products for a living, available to trade customers and retail buyers building and renovating around the world.
The design-build work is what established the credibility. The commerce business is where the scale lives. What they needed was a digital presence built to match both.
BSD Haus needed a local Los Angeles Shopify development agency to lay a new foundation for the build ahead.
The Opportunity
There’s a useful way to think about what a commerce website actually is. Most established brands spend heavily on physical retail: high-end leases, professional build-outs, architects, interior designers, brand consultants. The expectation is that walking into the store should feel like an experience. Every detail signals quality, credibility, and intent.
The same logic applies online, and the budget math is often even more compelling. What most businesses spend on digital advertising rivals or exceeds what they’d spend on a premium retail lease, and all of that traffic lands on the website. If the site doesn’t deliver the same caliber of experience as a well-designed physical store with knowledgeable sales associates guiding customers through a purchase, the investment in driving traffic is working against itself. You wouldn’t have someone throw together your flagship location from flat-pack furniture. The website deserves the same level of intention.
For BSD Haus, a brand built entirely around design sensibility and material expertise, that gap between the quality of the product and the quality of the digital experience was the central opportunity. The site needed to become an asset that matched the brand: one that guided customers through a considered, high-investment purchase with the clarity and confidence of a knowledgeable sales associate walking them through a well-appointed showroom.
Specifically, that meant addressing the visual identity and brand storytelling, a product catalog that needed structural work to be navigable and manageable, a customer journey built around how renovation shoppers actually browse, and a wholesale program with the infrastructure to support real growth.
The Approach
Brand and visual identity: a site with a point of view.
Every Conspire project is built on two pillars: customer trust and customer journey. Trust is established through a visual experience that’s polished, distinctive, and unmistakably intentional, the same principle behind why a well-designed retail environment makes you feel confident spending money there. Journey is the architecture that moves a customer from arrival to decision, with the clarity and confidence of a knowledgeable sales associate walking them through.
For a design studio selling premium materials, both pillars demanded serious attention. We built a site with a genuine sense of self: a visual language rooted in the brand’s design-first identity, editorial photography presented in a way that did justice to the materials, and storytelling that connected the product to BSD Haus’s origin and ethos. For a customer arriving cold from Google Shopping or a paid ad, that context matters. They’re not just buying tile. They’re buying into a point of view.
Navigation: meeting customers wherever they are in the process.
People shopping for a renovation project don’t all start from the same place. Some arrive with a room in mind and no idea what they’re looking for. Others know they want a specific material and are looking for the right color or shape. A navigation structure that only serves one of those modes loses everyone else.
We built around both:
- Shop by Space: for the customer in the exploratory phase, starting from a room and working toward a material. A curated entry point that narrows the catalog without overwhelming.
- Shop by Material: for the customer who knows what they want and is comparing options within a category, looking for the right finish, shape, or color variation.
Two modes, one navigation system. Neither path leads to a dead end.
Product filtering and browsing: fast, visual, and frictionless.
Browsing tile is a visual process. Customers make decisions based on how something looks in context, not how it’s described. We implemented custom filtering designed for how tile shoppers actually move through a catalog: by material, color, finish, and shape.
Product cards were upgraded with hover images that show the tile in real environments, so a browser can get a meaningful sense of how a material reads in a space without clicking through to a full product page. For a category where the purchase decision is largely visual, that added context does real work.
Pricing and the tile calculator: solving for how tile is actually sold.
Tile is sold by the box. Customers think in square feet. The gap between how the product is priced and how projects are scoped creates friction at exactly the moment a customer is trying to commit.
We surfaced per-square-foot pricing prominently throughout the catalog, so customers could evaluate cost in the unit that made sense to them. On the product page, we built an intuitive tile calculator: enter the dimensions of the space, get the number of boxes to add to cart. No manual math, no back-and-forth with a sales rep. The customer gets what they need and the path to purchase shortens.
Product detail pages: everything a buyer needs, nothing they don’t.
Tile is expensive to buy, expensive to install, and permanent once it’s in. The product page carries serious weight, and a customer making a significant investment in their home needs to feel informed, not overwhelmed.
We redesigned the PDPs to surface the right information in a digestible format: finished surface type, weight, and coverage per box all presented clearly above the fold. Installation and care guides were integrated directly into the page, particularly important for DIYers who need to know what they’re getting into before a shipment arrives.
Equally important was the editorial layer. Artisanal tile has a story: where it comes from, how it’s made, what makes it different. We gave each collection space for that narrative, weaving brand origin into the product context so that customers who arrived from anywhere, whether an organic search, Google Shopping, or a direct link, understood what they were looking at and why it was worth their attention.
Product catalog architecture: solving the variant problem.
One of the most technically nuanced aspects of the project was the product catalog structure. Tile often comes in the same design across multiple shapes and colorways, all meaningfully different products for filtering and inventory purposes, but all belonging to the same family for a shopper navigating the site.
The right architectural approach is to treat each shape and color variation as its own Shopify product, which gives the collection page clean, accurate filtering. But that approach creates a UX problem on the product page: a customer who wants to see the same tile in a different shape or color has no obvious way to get there without going back to the catalog.
We built custom configuration that links related products together on the product page, so a customer can switch between shapes and colorways in a single click without losing their place. It’s the correct solution to a real problem in tile and paint-adjacent categories, and it required careful work on both the consumer-facing side and the back-end inventory setup to get right.
Wholesale and trade: a program built to scale.
BSD Haus works with trade customers and dealers, a meaningful part of the business that had been running without the infrastructure to support it properly. Onboarding was manual. Partner management was scattered. Special pricing had no clean system behind it.
We integrated our proprietary Wholesale Pricing Goat application to give the wholesale program a real foundation without requiring BSD Haus to be on Shopify Plus. The app delivers everything a serious trade program needs: tiered discounts for trade and dealer accounts, volume pricing, and a full onboarding workflow, all running on standard Shopify. For context, Shopify Plus runs over $2,000 per month more than standard Shopify plans. The app closes that feature gap at a fraction of the cost.
- Trade and dealer applicants submit through a branded application page, with document uploads handled cleanly as part of the flow.
- Applications are reviewed, approved, or denied inside a unified dashboard within Shopify, keeping document management and partner records in one place.
- Approved accounts are automatically provisioned with their designated pricing catalog, with no manual entry, no parallel spreadsheets.
A wholesale program that actually works the way a wholesale program should.
Freight shipping: solving the logistics problem without creating a margin problem.
Tile is heavy. It ships by pallet. Standard parcel rates don’t apply, and building the wrong shipping logic into a commerce site either passes an unfair cost to the customer or creates a loss on every order.
We implemented an LTL freight solution that gives customers accurate, fair shipping pricing at checkout while protecting the business from unprofitable orders. The complexity is handled at the infrastructure level so neither the customer nor the operator has to think about it.
Sample ordering: getting customers past the sample and toward the purchase.
Tile is a tactile, context-dependent product. Most customers want to see and feel a sample before committing to a full order, which means sample ordering isn’t just a nice feature, it’s a step in the conversion path that needs to work well.
We added sample ordering directly from the product page for customers who arrive knowing what they want to evaluate. For customers still comparing options, we integrated Bonde’s build-a-box capability, which surfaces all available samples on a single page and allows customers to add multiple samples to an order in a single, frictionless session. No clicking through individual product pages. No friction at the point where a customer is closest to a purchase decision.
The sample order becomes the entry point to the full purchase, not a detour from it.
The Result
BSD Haus came to us with a site that didn’t tell their story, a product catalog that had grown unwieldy, and operational infrastructure that couldn’t support the wholesale program they needed to scale.
The site now has a genuine identity, one that reflects a design-forward brand and gives customers the context they need to make confident, high-consideration purchases. The catalog is structured correctly: easy to browse, easy to filter, and built so that switching between related products is seamless rather than laborious. Freight shipping is handled without making it the customer’s problem. Samples are easy to order and positioned as the first step toward a full purchase rather than a distraction from it. And the wholesale program has the infrastructure to grow.
The platform is no longer a constraint on the business. It’s an asset.
Conspire is a Los Angeles Shopify Plus Partner specializing in eCommerce website design and development for established brands.
