Tirvela Boutique

Tirvela Boutique is the curated Italian distributor of Mokann, a Polish natural-skincare house. The name evokes the drawn veil — a curator pulling back what conceals, and revealing. The customer reads ingredient lists, buys from Aesop and Buly, and finds quiet luxury more credible than loud novelty.

The mandate was unusually wide: build a storefront that never feels like a catalogue redirecting out to a supplier — everything happens inside Tirvela's design system, in Tirvela's voice — and stand it up in time for a fixed launch, with a single operator wearing every role. No brand book, no theme, no product data in Italian, no team to hand any of it to.

The interesting constraint wasn't any single discipline — it was that design, engineering, and commercial reality had one owner, so the decisions had to hold together across all three. Not four separate projects. One system of decisions that had to survive contact with the front end, the database, and the accountant.

A product experience designer first; a founding designer who ships, second. Concurrent, each constraining the others.

Built the design system as the single source everything else references: a six-colour, all-neutral palette; a locked type pairing; a 4px spatial scale; motion durations; and premium-signal rules (one hero and one CTA per section, editorial sentences over bullets, no urgency timers, no discount badges).

Because the person who defined the tokens also wrote the CSS, the system was executable, not aspirational — the palette hexes ship in the theme.

Flows, not just screens. The experience is organised around a diagnostic quiz — Cosa cerca la tua pelle? — that turns a wide catalogue into one considered recommendation, and quietly becomes the demand-data engine the commercial model depends on. Product pages are ingredient-led without going clinical; the collection uses a mixed-size editorial grid.

One signature interaction anchors the system: the drawn veil — a single slow reveal, used once per page at most, where the most important moment enters as if fabric were being lifted. The brand's name expressed as motion.

The storefront runs on Shopify's Horizon theme. I forked the live theme and rebuilt the visual layer as custom tirvela-* sections — each editor-friendly, each independently roll-back-able, each preserving the reviews, email-capture, loyalty, and translation apps already wired in.

Design tokens became real CSS custom properties (glass surfaces, blur, reveal motion) applied through a trv- BEM convention, so the light and dark editorial schemes stay consistent without duplicating styles.

Accessibility was a spec item, not a wish. Every colour pairing verified against WCAG 2.2 before shipping. Scroll reveals run through one idempotent IntersectionObserver that respects prefers-reduced-motion; focus rings visible; touch targets ≥44px; a Salta al contenuto skip-link in the head.

The products existed in Polish, on the source house's site. Getting 32 of them into Shopify — correctly matched, translated, enriched with metafields, SEO-clean — was a data problem. Built a Node pipeline for it behind a custom Shopify dev app instead of copy-pasting by hand.

Tirvela sells DTC first, then uses a year of demand data to walk into Italian wholesale (saloni, parafarmacie, profumerie, hotel SPA) with proof instead of a pitch. That strategy is why the diagnostic quiz exists, why data hygiene is strict, and why the storefront is modular enough to add brands later.

The wholesale conversation isn't "please stock us." It's a dashboard: here are the postcodes, the porosity distributions, the basket sizes, the repeat rate. Hard to dismiss.

The supply chain, owned end-to-end. Negotiated the international distribution terms directly — a waived freight cost on the pilot order and a tiered minimum-order structure (€500 scaling to €800+) that protected cash flow while demand was still unproven. When the first cross-border shipment landed with damaged units and missing SKUs, ran the recovery personally: a structured, spreadsheet-based tracking system reconciling every line against the order, closing the gaps without moving the launch date.

Compliant by design. Data model mapped to GDPR lawful bases (contract, consent, legitimate interest); payment stack kept at PCI scope SAQ-A (no card field ever renders on our domain); Italian essentials specified: IVA 22% in displayed prices, fattura elettronica to the SDI, 14-day right of return under the Codice del Consumo. Wrote the full legal suite (Privacy, Cookie, T&C, Spedizioni, Resi e Recesso, Informazioni Legali).