Thread & Hem · Retail & Services

A tailor with no way to book a fitting

Thread & Hem's craft speaks for itself once a garment is in hand. Getting a garment in hand was the problem — the old site had no booking system, no prices, and a mangled sentence in the middle of its own headline.

Role: Website redesign, UX, build
Year: 2025
Deliverables: Responsive site, service pages, appointment booking, portfolio of alterations

The Thread & Hem homepage shown on a laptop and a phone, a photograph of a seamstress at work with the headline Custom Sewing & Alterations. — A genuinely skilled craftsperson, represented by a site whose own tagline had a garbled sentence in it and no way to book an appointment.

The problem

Thread & Hem does precise, patient work — wedding dress fittings, custom tailoring, alterations that require real skill to get right. The website undercut that precision immediately: a run-on, slightly garbled sentence in the hero copy, and no booking mechanism beyond a phone number.

For services like a wedding dress fitting, timing matters enormously — clients need to book weeks out and see availability, which the old site gave no way to do. Every booking required a call during shop hours, competing with customers already at the counter.

There was also no way to see the quality of past work. Alterations are inherently a before-and-after craft, and the site had neither.

The approach

Three moves, in order.

Clean up the language, precisely

Every page was rewritten and proofread, matching the precision of the actual craft instead of undermining it with a garbled headline.

Let appointments be booked by garment type

A form capturing garment type and service needed replaces the phone-only booking, so a wedding dress fitting is scheduled with the time it actually requires.

Show the before and after

A gallery of real alteration work — the same garment before and after — gives new clients something concrete to judge the shop's skill by.

The work

What we built.

The new homepage

The new Thread & Hem homepage on desktop and mobile: a close detail of hands pinning fabric on a dress form beside a serif headline reading Made to fit you. — The homepage, as precise as the craft. A close detail of the work itself, and copy that was actually proofread.

The services page: a three-card grid for Custom Tailoring, Alterations and Wedding Dress Fitting, each with a line icon and short description. — Three services, described plainly and correctly.

The book an appointment page: a form with garment type, service needed dropdown and preferred date fields. — Booking by garment type, so a wedding dress fitting isn't squeezed into a fifteen-minute slot.

The our work page: a grid of six before-and-after garment alteration photo cards, each showing a garment before and after tailoring. — Real before-and-afters, the clearest evidence of skill a tailoring business can show.

Also delivered

A rush-service flag on the booking form for clients within two weeks of an event, since last-minute alteration requests — previously handled as frantic phone calls — are now flagged and triaged automatically.

Results

First two quarters on the new site.

+58%

Appointments booked online

+31%

Wedding dress fitting bookings, booked further in advance

2.3×

Time spent on the before-and-after gallery

Garbled sentences left in the copy

“We take enormous care with every stitch and our website read like nobody had proofread it once. Fixing that, and finally letting people book online, changed how seriously people took us before they'd even walked in.”

Amara Osei-BonsuOwner, Thread & Hem

Figures are illustrative of the outcomes this engagement was designed to produce and are shown here for portfolio purposes.

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