As the design intern on 2323Designs' move from Shopify to StoreHippo, I redesigned the landing page, navigation, product pages, category pages, and mobile app — backed by a six-brand competitive audit, and shipped alongside two onboarded vendors and StoreHippo's own development team.
What 2323Designs is, what the move to StoreHippo actually required, and where I sat in it.
2323Designs is a New Delhi-based e-commerce company built around sustainable, consciously made products, sourcing and selling goods from small, independent sustainable brands rather than mass-market inventory.
2323Designs was migrating its entire storefront from Shopify to StoreHippo. That's not a re-skin — every template, page, and interaction pattern had to be rebuilt for a new platform, on a fixed five-month internship timeline, with the founders and StoreHippo's own development team as the only other people in the loop.
I owned design for the pages a shopper actually moves through: the landing page, navigation, product pages, and category pages, plus the mobile app. I ran the competitive research that shaped scope going in, and I was in the room for the calls that decided what shipped and what got cut when timeline and ambition disagreed.
months, start to handoff
surfaces redesigned
vendors onboarded
competitors audited
Before redesigning a single page, I ran a SWOT and social-media competitor analysis across six sustainable e-commerce brands, to understand how 2323Designs needed to look and behave differently once it left Shopify's template constraints behind.
The audit wasn't academic — on a five-month migration, its job was to answer one question fast: what does this storefront need to get right on day one, at the level a moving deadline actually allows?
That question is what turned into the first real design decision of the migration: how the navigation itself should work. Not a redesign for its own sake — a specific call, made under a specific constraint, that the rest of this page walks through.
The one decision from this internship I'd point to first — made directly with the founders, not handed down from a brief.
The existing template's signature navigation feature was a mega-menu hover panel that surfaced a thumbnail image for every category. It looked considered on Shopify. On a migration to a new platform, it meant three things: every category needed a sourced and maintained image, StoreHippo's dev team had to build and support a heavier hover component from scratch, and the menu took longer to scan than a shopper deciding between categories needed it to.
No category launches or reorders without a matching image getting sourced and swapped in first.
A text menu is a smaller, faster component to build and support than a maintained image-hover grid on a new platform.
Six category names read in one glance; six thumbnails ask a shopper to look at each one first.
I brought the recommendation to the founders directly — not a stakeholder committee, the two people who'd own the site after I left — and we made the call together. Text-only categories shipped in the final navigation.
Five surfaces, rebuilt for StoreHippo rather than re-skinned from the old Shopify templates.
The first storefront view rebuilt for StoreHippo's template system, setting the visual language the rest of the migration followed.
The text-only category redesign covered above — the highest-leverage call of the project.
Rebuilt on the new platform's constraints, for shoppers comparing sustainable goods against mainstream alternatives.
Restructured around the simplified navigation, so the browsing path stayed consistent from menu to listing.
A parallel mobile experience, designed alongside the web migration rather than as an afterthought once web shipped.
The parts of a migration that don't show up in a Figma file.
I onboarded 2 vendors onto the new platform, walking each through what the migration meant for their existing listings and what StoreHippo would need from them to go live — the part of a platform switch that happens outside any design tool.
I coordinated migration meetings directly with StoreHippo's development team, turning the redesigned pages into build-ready specs and resolving the gap between what I'd designed and what their platform supported out of the box — the text-only navigation call among it.
This internship wasn't scoped for moderated usability testing or SUS scores, so I won't manufacture some. By the end of the five months, 2323Designs' landing page, navigation, product pages, category pages, and mobile app had shipped on StoreHippo, with two vendors onboarded and the text-only navigation call carried into the final build.
The metric that mattered was simpler: a migration with a hard deadline, shipped inside it, with the founders signing off on every major call along the way.
A six-brand SWOT audit on a five-month clock isn't exhaustive research — it's research scoped to answer one decision. Learning to stop at "enough to decide" instead of "enough to be thorough" is a different skill than research done with no deadline.
Recommending the nav change meant convincing two founders who'd live with the consequences, not a hypothetical user tested in a lab. That changes how you argue for a decision — cost and maintenance mattered as much as usability.
Coordinating with StoreHippo's dev team and onboarding vendors taught me that a redesign only ships if the people building and stocking it can actually act on what you handed them.
This internship is where I felt the cost of skipping research depth firsthand. The self-directed concept projects elsewhere on this site — Cairn, Compass, Foundry, Voicefront — are where I gave myself the room this migration's timeline didn't: full usability testing, iteration, and measured outcomes.