A running brand, from blank canvas to checkout, in one week

The brief was simple, which made it dangerous: make it feel like an art-direction site and perform like a tight React build — for a fictitious UK running label — and ship it fast. Art-direction invites indulgence; performance punishes it. The real question was never “can I make it pretty” or “can I make it fast,” but where to spend the budget so it reads as editorial without the front-end paying for it.

The buyer is design-aware, 28–45, running four to six sessions a week — they’ve seen every hero carousel and tune them out on sight. So the question got concrete: what is the minimum a runner needs to decide? Three numbers — drop, stack height, and plate stiffness. Every product page bends toward surfacing those fast, then getting out of the way.

Liquid glass over a single green pulse. Glass surfaces layered on soft 3D product renders — backdrop-blur with saturation, glass-on-glass depth, subtle inner gradients. The language borrows from visionOS but warms it with editorial type, so it never reads as cold OS chrome. I prototyped twelve glass variants directly in code, because the line between “premium” and “uncertain” is only visible in motion, against real product shots.

It’s barely an interface — it’s a small system. One header, one canonical footer, one shared product card, every component earning its place on more than one page. Five reusable patterns do the heavy lifting, each defined once and propagated everywhere: category-aware URLs, an auto-rotating hero, a live drop countdown with zero layout shift, spec-led editorial motion, and a global image-fallback observer so nothing ever renders a broken frame.