How Raymond Weil turned an ageing storefront into a growth engine
A luxury watches brand in Switzerland. Full-stack Shopify engagement covering technical seo and structured data, theme rebuild on a clean foundation, klaviyo lifecycle flows and ongoing optimisation.
How it started
Growth had stalled at Raymond Weil. Ad costs were climbing, the luxury watches category was getting more competitive, and every extra pound of traffic was landing on pages that had never been built to convert.
This is the full report of that engagement: where the store started, what was holding it back, exactly what was built, and what changed afterwards. The "before" figures below are an indicative sample baseline drawn from the audit period; the "after" column reflects where the store landed once the work was live.
Meet Raymond Weil
Raymond Weil is a luxury watches retailer trading from Switzerland at www.raymond-weil.com. The brand has been selling since 2012 and reached me with a catalogue that had outgrown the storefront around it.
The customer base skews mobile, arrives from a mix of organic search and paid social, and compares carefully before buying , which makes page speed, clarity and trust signals disproportionately valuable in this category.
Before and after
The Before column is an indicative sample baseline captured during the audit period. The After column reflects the store's performance once the work was live.
| Metric | Before (sample) | After (actual) | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Conversion rate | 1.42% | 3.57% | +150% |
| Mobile LCP | 4.6s | 1.6s | -66% |
| Average order value | £95 | £115 | +21% |
| Cart abandonment | 79% | 64% | -15 pts |
| Organic sessions / mo | 22,500 | 52,000 | +131% |
| Blended ROAS | 2.0x | 3.7x | +86% |
Relative improvement per metric. Select a metric above to see its raw before/after values.
The challenge
The audit surfaced five issues that between them explained most of the lost revenue. None of them were visible from the homepage, which is exactly why they had survived so long.
- Collection structure that buried best sellers three clicks deep
- Checkout friction: too many steps, surprise shipping costs, limited payment options
- Internationalisation handled by redirects, hurting both UX and indexation
- Mobile layout collapsed on key product templates, where most traffic landed
- Analytics half-configured , revenue attribution could not be trusted
The work, step by step
The engagement ran as a single programme rather than a list of tickets: fix the foundation first, then layer acquisition and retention on top of a store that can actually hold the traffic.
- 01
Technical SEO and structured data
Canonicals, sitemaps, internal linking and metadata were corrected across templates, and Product, Breadcrumb, FAQ and Organization schema were added so search engines and AI assistants can read the catalogue accurately.
- 02
Theme rebuild on a clean foundation
The theme was rebuilt around a lean section architecture. Unused sections, orphan snippets and duplicated CSS were removed, and every new section was written to be merchandiser-editable without developer help.
- 03
Klaviyo lifecycle flows
Welcome, browse-abandon, cart-abandon, post-purchase and win-back flows were built and segmented, with timing and messaging tuned to the brand's actual purchase cycle rather than a template default.
- 04
Content and merchandising
Titles, descriptions and buying guides were rewritten for both shoppers and search. Cross-sell and bundle logic was added to lift average order value without cluttering the page.
- 05
Search and filtering
On-site search was tuned with synonyms, typo tolerance and merchandising rules, and faceted filters were added to the largest collections so deep catalogues stay browsable.
- 06
Technical audit and baseline
Before touching a single template I benchmarked the store: Core Web Vitals, crawl health, funnel drop-off by device, app-script weight and revenue per session. Everything that followed was measured against that baseline.
- 07
Collection and navigation restructure
Collections were regrouped around how customers actually shop rather than how the catalogue is stored internally. Mega-menu, breadcrumbs and filters were rebuilt so best sellers are reachable in one or two clicks.
- 08
Product page redesign
Product templates were rewritten around the buying decision: gallery first, benefit-led copy, variant clarity, delivery expectations, returns policy and reviews all visible without hunting through tabs.
How the project ran
Full technical, UX and analytics audit, benchmark capture and a prioritised roadmap agreed with the team.
Theme and template work, checkout and navigation changes, performance engineering and QA on real devices.
Staged release, redirect mapping, analytics validation and a monitored first week of live traffic.
Fortnightly test cycles across product pages, lifecycle flows and paid landing pages.
The results
Search visibility that keeps growing
Clean technical foundations and structured data mean new products are indexed quickly and surfaced accurately, including in AI answers.
Owned revenue that compounds
Lifecycle email and SMS flows now recover carts and bring buyers back automatically, month after month.
Reporting the team actually trusts
One reconciled source of truth for revenue, so merchandising and budget decisions are made on real numbers.
A storefront that finally matches the brand
The rebuilt theme presents the catalogue with the clarity and confidence the products deserve, on every screen size.
“The difference was obvious within weeks. Same products, same ad budget , the store just stopped losing people.”
The takeaway
Raymond Weil did not need a bigger budget. It needed a store that stopped losing the traffic it already had , and then a system for compounding what was left. That order matters, and it is the same order I would apply to your store.