Case study · Gold Earth
An award-winning skincare brand, rebuilt in ten working days.
Gold Earth had the substance premium brands spend years chasing — a Vegan Beauty Award, certified formulations, more than fifty genuine reviews. What it did not have was a storefront that carried any of it. This is what changed, and how.
100
AI visibility score, up from 71
6
Page types rebuilt
40
Product photographs produced
0
Minutes of downtime
Built on a duplicate of the live theme. The shop kept trading throughout, and the old design stayed one click away the entire time.
The client
Gold Earth — handmade botanical oils, Wiltshire
Eight products between £38.99 and £160, blended in small batches by founder Samina Khan-Sharma. A Vegan Beauty Award 2025 win, CPSR safety certification on every product, two UK Small Business Awards finalist placings and 18.9K followers on Instagram.
The brand was already priced for the premium botanical market. It was being presented one tier below it — and the proof it had earned was buried where nobody would find it.
goldearth.co.ukThe design read high street
A stock theme with a carousel hero, gradient buttons and a hand-made before/after graphic — at a price point sitting alongside Votary and de Mamiel.
The proof was invisible to Google
Our read-only audit scored the store 71/100 with five findings. No product schema on any product page, so prices and review stars never reached search results. No brand identity in knowledge graphs at all.
Photography undersold the product
Several products had one or two plain pack shots and no lifestyle or texture imagery. At £44.99 a bottle, photography is the price justification.
The copy carried medical claims
Hair growth, inflammation, alopecia, psoriasis. Real customer outcomes — but under UK cosmetics rules a cosmetic cannot claim to treat a condition, and that was sitting quietly in live copy.
Before and after
Drag the handle
Every frame here is a real screenshot taken at the same viewport on the same day: the live store on one side, the rebuilt store on the other. None of it is a mockup.
Homepage
A carousel and stacked promotional bars become one photographic statement and a single clear route into the range.
Collection page
A wall of small text above a default grid becomes a hair-and-scalp landing page with its own imagery, ingredient story and comparison table.
Product page
The buy box now leads with what the oil does, in cosmetic language, with botanicals, verified reviews, payment marks and delivery terms visible without scrolling.
On a phone
Where most of the traffic actually is. Three promotional bars stood between the visitor and the product; now the product is immediate.
Before
After
Three complete design directions were built before a line of the store was touched. See all three concepts
Two of them came with a scroll film — one golden drop falling through a royal garden, the whole page a single continuous shot. Neither was asked for. Both are still up. Watch "One Drop"
The work
Six deliverables, every one of them something you can see
A new store, six page types
Homepage, product, collection, story, FAQ and a new journal — rebuilt on a duplicate theme, so the live shop was untouched until launch day. Everything stays editable in Shopify's normal editor afterwards, with no developer needed.
AI search visibility
All five audit findings closed: Product and Offer schema with price and availability on all eight products, FAQPage schema, Organization and WebSite schema, rewritten titles and descriptions, image alt text, and an llms.txt so AI assistants can read the catalogue.
Forty product photographs
Five per product across all eight — one hero and four lifestyle scenes, made from her own bottles so every label stays true. Plus Instagram-sized copies of each, so the feed and the store finally match.
A medical claims audit
Four thousand sentences of live copy scanned and then read by eye — product pages, collections, FAQ and five knowledge-centre articles. Sixty-three flags at the widest point; nothing left open in the new build.
Trust architecture
The Vegan Beauty Award, CPSR certification and more than fifty verified reviews moved out of carousels and into the places a buyer actually looks — with finalist placings labelled as finalist, never as wins.
Twenty-four articles, one journal
Her writing was spread across five separate Shopify blogs. The new journal gathers all of it into one feed and picks up new posts automatically — without moving a single URL, so nothing that ranked was lost.
Thirty pages, two widths, every check
Scripted QA across thirty URLs at desktop and phone: JavaScript errors, horizontal overflow, broken images, fonts, reduced motion, add-to-cart through to checkout, and every section in the theme editor.
Handover and aftercare
A one-page brand guide with the real colours and type read out of the built stylesheet, a plain-English editing guide, and fourteen days on call after launch.
The part most redesigns skip
Gold Earth's oils genuinely help people. Customers write in about eczema and thinning hair, and the founder's own experience is why the brand exists. But under the Human Medicines Regulations and the UK Cosmetics Regulation a cosmetic cannot claim to treat a condition — and a testimonial cannot carry a claim the brand could not make itself.
Scanned
4,063 sentences across products, collections, pages and theme content — not only the product descriptions.
Rewritten
Hair growth, inflammation, alopecia and cell regeneration replaced with cosmetic wording that still sells.
Added
Allergy and patch-test guidance on all eight product pages, and a safety note on every knowledge-centre article.
The scanner is a first pass, not a legal clearance, and the written record we hand over says so. A handful of items remain on the client's live store because they are her copy and her decision — documented for her rather than changed without asking.
How it was done
One operator, agents doing the volume
There was no team. Work that would normally need a designer, a developer, a photographer, an SEO specialist and a copywriter was run by one person directing AI agents — with every repeatable step written as a script that can be re-run, checked and handed over.
That is why a £1,745 package fits into ten days, and why this level of rigour is affordable at this size. It is also how we run our own Shopify store, every day.
Scripted, not clicked
Content export, asset staging, metafield writes, SEO application and the claims scan are all scripts with self-checks. Anything done once by hand gets done wrong the second time.
Verified, not assumed
Every change was confirmed in the rendered page rather than in the code that produced it — with a cache-busting check, because a CDN will happily show you a stale success.
Written down, not remembered
The client keeps the claims record, the post-launch checklist and the handover guide — including the mistakes we made and corrected, left visible on purpose.
Well done and congratulations for doing a brilliant work. You have actually put it better than I thought.
Samina Khan-Sharma
Founder, Gold Earth
The same work, for your store
What it costs
Gold Earth paid a one-time founding rate in exchange for being the public case study. These are the standard prices, and what the work costs from here.
Workstream one
Store redesign
Six page types rebuilt on a duplicate theme, brand guide, trust architecture, claims-compliant copy, handover and fourteen days of aftercare.
£995
Workstream two
AI SEO Overhaul
Every finding from the read-only audit fixed — schema, titles, descriptions, alt text, llms.txt — with the same audit re-run afterwards and the before/after sent to you in writing.
£495
Workstream three
Product imagery
Five photographs per product, made from your own bottles so labels stay true, plus Instagram-sized copies of every shot.
£595
This suits you if
You sell a premium physical product on Shopify and the store presents it a tier below its price.
You have real proof — awards, certifications, genuine reviews — that the site is not using.
You are in a regulated category, and the copy has to sell without straying into claims you cannot make.
You want to own and edit the result yourself afterwards, rather than rent it.
Start
Tell us about your store
A free read-only audit of your storefront comes back with a score and the top three findings — no access, no credentials, nothing changed. It is the same crawl we ran on Gold Earth before writing a word of the proposal.