During my internship with BetterLesson, I was approached by our project manager Elvin to redesign his wife's business website where she hand-knitted and sold jorabs, traditional house shoes largely worn in Middle Eastern countries.
The project turned out to be two-fold: one where I spent a full day with Elvin and his wife Sacha to photograph them and their products, and the other making their website user-friendly and visually appealing through design and language.
In the making of the product shots, I found out that Sacha's inspiration for her work came from no other than Elvin and his Azerbaijani heritage. While she had mentioned this in her website, I felt it would have been a missed opportunity to not illustrate this story further.
And so I did research on Azerbaijani culture and history and learned about the country's long-standing carpet weaving culture. The text below in Our Story page is what came out of it.
*Alexa is Sacha's pseudonym for the web.
In the two Product Browse pages below, I created a visual language through the photographs where the unisex products were presented in one way and the female products another. This way, viewers would remember which page they were on and which products they were looking at as they navigated the website.
As part of my payment, I received a pair of jorabs that I gave to my mother. Being a Buddhist, she wears them every morning when she does her daily meditation.
