Aquamarise

Aquamarise sells handmade, ethically crafted rings and jewelry with a fantasy feel. The store ran on Shopify Plus, and the team had already written long buyer guides on engagement rings, gemstones, couple rings and precious metals. What they lacked were pages that looked as considered as the jewelry.

The brief covered four pages modeled on Brilliant Earth: collection pages with filters for metal, style and gemstone, a blog listing page, a mission page and a gifts page. Every page had to feel luxury, work well on mobile and load fast. The team later added a supplemental gift guide and asked about warranty and appraisal pages.

The guides were split across two places. Some lived under /pages/, like the alternative engagement rings guide and the precious metal guide. Others sat in the Journal blog. A standard blog section can only show blog posts, so the pages-based guides had no way onto the listing.

The Journal page had no design at all. The team had just started the blog, so the copy for an "Aquamarise Jewelry Guides" hub was ready, but nothing on the store could hold four themed sections of guide cards.

There was no place to send gift shoppers. Brilliant Earth points people to gift collections sorted by price. Aquamarise had no landing page like that, and no page that explained the brand's mission and ethical sourcing.

A second developer was building the mega menu on the same theme copy. If both of us saved changes at the same time, one person's work could wipe out the other's. We had to plan the work around that.

• 01 A draft theme with editable placeholders We did all of the work on a draft copy of the theme, so the live store stayed untouched while the team prepared photos. Each page went in with placeholder text and images that the team could swap out in the theme editor, which is how they edit every page. We shared preview links as each page came together, so feedback happened on the real layout and not on mockups.
• 02 The Aquamarise Jewelry Guides hub We built the Journal page from the team's own copy. It opens with the "Aquamarise Jewelry Guides" hero and three outlined buttons: Shop Engagement Rings, Find My Ring Size and Explore Gemstone Guides. The page then runs into sections for engagement ring guides, wedding and couples ring guides, and gemstone guides covering aquamarine, moonstone, moss agate, alexandrite and opal. We added Breadcrumb schema, plus ItemList schema for the four posts shown by default.
• 03 Portrait guide cards that link anywhere The team wanted the /pages/ guides to sit beside the blog posts. We added a section of 2:3 portrait cards above the engagement ring guides and set it up as a custom list rather than a blog feed. Each card is a block with its own image and link, so it can point to the couple rings guide, the precious metal guide or any other page. We also made the hero thinner on mobile and moved the buttons under it.
• 04 A gifts landing page sorted by collection Following the Brilliant Earth gifts page, we built a gifts landing page that sends shoppers into the team's gift collections, including collections sorted by price. The team asked for the image tiles to be customizable like the reference screenshots, so every image can be replaced from the theme editor. The team approved it the day after the first preview.
• 05 A mission page in the brand's voice Next we built the mission page, based on Brilliant Earth's About section. It gives Aquamarise a place to explain its handmade, ethically crafted approach. The team asked for this page ahead of the gift guide so they could finish the gift collections first. We shared the desktop preview the same day, and the team signed off on it.
• 06 Working around the mega menu build Partway through, the team told us another developer would be working on the mega menu in the same theme copy. We paused theme work so neither of us would overwrite the other's saves, then picked it up again once the menu work was pushed back. The team finished their own content edits on the Journal page and published all the pages on January 9.