Shopify Website Development for Bed Manufacturer—Samiraq’s Digital Transformation Journey with Codestro

In the ever-evolving landscape of luxury furniture retail, an impactful online presence is not just a luxury but a necessity. Samiraq is a prominent family-run furniture manufacturer based in North Yorkshire, UK, with the intent to present its beautifully crafted bespoke upholstered beds and furniture to a wider online audience. Codestro was tasked to convert their craftsmanship and bespoke design philosophy into a high-quality, scalable Shopify website that was well aligned with their brand and that allowed customers to experience an enjoyable and seamless shopping journey.

This case study illustrates how Codestro worked with Samiraq to design and create a feature-rich Shopify store that allowed the brand to scale digitally while preserving its artisan craft.

About the Client: Samiraq

Samiraq is known across the UK for having elegantly designed and custom-made beds, sofas, and mattresses. All of their products are hand-crafted to exhibit beautiful design and premium quality materials, as well as luxurious finishes. Samiraq has a wide range of beds, including traditional divan and ottoman beds, as well as contemporary styles such as panel beds, sleigh beds, and wingback beds, showcasing their versatility and style.

The bespoke furniture, innovative with a customer-focused development of purchasing services available through the medium of bespoke furniture has led Samiraq to attain a cherished reputation within the UK. However, their former online nature did not have the characteristics or even sophistication to serve as a useful online destination.

Project Goals

Samiraq when he came to Codestro, had three main aims:

1. To construct a high-quality Shopify storefront that would be constructed within the luxury brand.
2. When the product customization permits the choice of size, color, fabric, or design combination.
3. In order to make it easy to manage at the back end to enable the Samiraq team to keep on updating the site content and manage the stock.

The challenge of such a project was to achieve the balance between functionality, design, and performance that should incorporate the principles of the brand: luxury, comfort, and eternal beauty of craft.

Why Shopify?

Shopify was a simple choice to include in this project based on the larger product catalog that Samiraq had to offer, the cost requirements to customize products, as well as the need to use a platform that was scalable. Shopify was recommended by codestro due to the following reasons:

• It supports rich product variants and bundling.
• It supports secure and seamless checkout.
• For non-technical users, it is easy to manage the content, stock, and orders. 
• It presents high-quality visuals, lookbooks, and branded storytelling. 

By using Shopify, we were able to offer Samiraq a user-friendly back-end, enterprise-level performance, and a storefront that can help elevate their brand identity.

Discovery and Research Phase

Codestro kicked off the project with a strategic discovery stage, which included: 

• Market Research: Loved researching top luxury furniture brands and understanding their online user experience. 
• Competitor Benchmarking: Evaluating how other UK manufacturers positioned their offerings online.
• User Journey Mapping: Identify buyer personas (interior designers, homeowners, furniture resellers) and tailor the experience to what they need.
• Content Strategy: Work with Samiraq to make sure every product description, photo, and brand message supports the identity of Samiraq.

Design Approach: Translating Elegance into UI/UX

Our design objective was clear: build a modern, elegant and intuitive UI/UX interface to convey the richness of Samiraq’s products.

Key Design Highlights:

• Less is More with Bold Images: We used a simple layout format with high-resolution images of the products. The website displays beds and sofas set up in rooms to imitate a complete shopping experience.
• Custom Size and Color Selection UI: For each bed or sofa, the user can select the size (single, double, king, etc.), upholstery color, and any added features (i.e., storage, headboard shape).
• Luxury Feel on Mobile: Considering over 70% of Samiraq’s visitors would come from mobile devices, we made sure load times were quick and the mobile shopping experience was smooth.
• Sticky navigation, smart filtering: Each product featured a unique browsing experience thanks to smart filters by bed type, size, and style, and sticky navigation to make it easier to jump categories when needed. 
• Integrated Lookbooks: Codestro integrated lifestyle photography in a “Lookbook” section to inspire visitors and allow visitors to envision Samiraq pieces in their homes. 

Development: Building the Backend to Match the Frontend

Codestro’s development team used a custom theme in Shopify that matched the high-end look and feel of the designs, while providing a variety of features that were low code and performance optimized, to resolve issues Samiraq was facing a slow app and huge customizations on their website.

Key Features Implemented:

1. Custom Product Variants:
   
   • While products have multiple attributes (bed type, fabric color, size, storage options), we used Shopify’s product option to create flexible, dynamic listings for products.
     
2. Inventory and Order Management Setup:
   
   • Back end was configured for Samiraq’s team to track order status, easily update stock levels, and product variations.
3. Multiple Collection Pages:
   
   •  Beds, headboards, mattresses were categorized into collections.
   • Each collection page has filters and sorting by popularity, price, and design.
     
4. Responsive Design:
   
   • Pixel perfect on all devices and browsers.
   • We implemented lazy loading & image optimization for faster mobile performance.
     
5. Customer Review Section:
   
   • We built-in a review module for products, enhancing trust and engagement.
     
6. SEO and Schema Markup:
   
   • We added schema for the products and page for reviews.
   •  Template optimization all URLs, meta tags and headings. 

Result: A Digital Storefront That Matches a Physical Legacy

The finished Shopify site for Samiraq was more than a storefront—it was an extension of their brand’s history and legacy. Since the launch of the site, Samiraq has observed:

• Increase in Inquiries: The seamless customer experience with beautiful imagery inspired customers to inquire directly through the site.
• More Engagement with Products: Customers engaged with products longer than ever and enjoyed customizing products.
• Increase in Conversions: The enhanced UX and simplified customer checkout process increased conversions significantly.

Key Takeaways

• Luxury Product Brands Require Tailored Shopify Solutions: A standard template is not going to work for high-end furniture brands as Codestro’s intention was to ensure every experience on the site represented Samiraq.
• Customization Creates Engagement: By allowing color, size and design selections, Samiraq gave shoppers the opportunity to feel engaged in the creation experience.
• Visual Storytelling Drives Conversions: The combination of lookbooks, lifestyle imagery and seamless experience gave users an emotional connection to the product before it reached their home.
• Shopify’s Scale Enables Smaller Manufacturers to Grow: Samiraq’s family-run legacy business now has the necessary infrastructure to grow their operations and reach customers across the UK—and beyond.

The evolution of Samiraq from a local manufacturer to a digital luxury furniture brand has just begun. With a firm basis on Shopify, Samiraq can now easily increase its operations, look for overseas markets and offer new products with a scalable and future-proof ecommerce platform that Codestro facilitated.