Marrow Ceramics

Marrow makes slow, expensive, deeply considered objects, and then sold them through a site that loaded a carousel of stock photography. The mismatch was costing them commissions.

The premise

For work like this, browsing is the sale. Someone who spends fifteen minutes looking at glaze variation is not killing time — they are talking themselves into a two thousand dollar commission. So the site is built around looking, and almost everything else was cut.

What we built

A hand-coded Astro site with no commerce at all. Each collection is a single long page: large photographs at full bleed, minimal chrome, and a running caption in the margin that explains what you are looking at as you scroll.

Commissions run through a short form that asks four questions instead of the usual twenty. The questions were the design work — they are the ones Ines was already asking by email, in the order she asks them.

What changed

Average engaged time on the collection pages is over eleven minutes, which is an absurd figure for a website and exactly what it was designed to do. Commission enquiries roughly doubled, and Ines reports that they arrive far better qualified.

People arrive already knowing what they want. The conversations are completely different now. Ines Marrow, co-founder