Hey, everyone. Co-founder of Cotton Bureau and front-end dev for the aforementioned re-design here. Couple quick thoughts about our goals with the re-design.

First, the old version of the homepage (still available at https://cottonbureau.com/shop) was never intended to be the ultimate expression of Cotton Bureau. It was the simplest page we could build when we launched 2.5 years ago. We’ve added features and toyed with the hero area in the mean time, but a change was long overdue.

Second, submissions are the lifeblood of Cotton Bureau. If designers don’t send in designs, we don’t have a site. We needed to make that a lot more clear from the jump. The giant testimonial and submit button is a step in the right direction, but it certainly won’t be our last. Speaking of which, if you’re interested in making shirts with us, come right this way.

Third, to date, we’ve done a poor job of featuring the actual designers of the shirts on the site. We wanted the re-design to have a greater emphasis on the people behind the shirts. You’ll see that idea carried through to the rest of the site as we apply more of the features we’ve been discussing internally over the coming year.

Fourth, Cotton Bureau is equal parts platform and store. Anyone with design chops can use it, but that means a lot of the responsibility to sell a design rests on your shoulders. We need to actively work on our ability to assist designers in selling shirts, and that means building new tools to promote them. Being in the huge wall of shirts does very little for a designer in terms of sales. Moving that experience to /shop is not going to change that at all. We will still be actively directing traffic that way, but the home page itself needed to evolve to give us more of the capabilities I mentioned above.

Like the rest of the site, the new home page is a work in progress. I’m happy to answer any questions I can about design, technical, or business decisions we made. Feel free to say nice things as well.

That new landing page is pretty brutal to scroll through and digest. It's like everything is shouting at me and competing for my attention.

1. The top is FAR too wordy. I've visited it twice now and still haven't read it all. It's not hooking me. It's tedious to be honest. Try and make much simpler statement like"designed by people just like you" followed by a learn more link to expand details.

2. There are situations where on my screen there is nothing to do, which is really bad. I can scroll to points where I see a headshot of a designer for a pervious shirt, but then see a title and design for the shirt below it... and still have no action except to bail out to social media. This is not slippery enough. I think there needs to be a better balance of making this feel more community oriented, but still making it easy to buy a shirt or see more of a selection.

3. It's not clear enough that there are a TON more designs when you click shop versus what you show me on the home screen. A new visitor is not going to expect that clicking SHOP shows them far more options than what you presented.

4. This is a site that because of the way it's coded, gets obnoxiously big when I view it on my 27" monitor. The fonts and everything get so big it's pretty much un-digestible. I'd strongly consider setting a max width this thing will go.

As a side note, I honestly wish you'd just feature one designer a month, have a cool interview/bio and focus on the product. It would feel more focused and genuine to me that way. That's just my opinion though.

Is there a reason behind the interlaced images rather than having normal loading images with a placeholder?

I think there is a problem with your low sales numbers for the first shirts, with resulted at least in my mind in a negative social proof and kept me from purchasing or generating more interest in these shirts.

like it

I like those super big fonts