HKV Benaras

HKV Benaras is a saree and ethnic-wear retailer in Parramatta. The stock is handwoven silk, mostly one piece per design, sold online to customers across Australia and in person to people who want to see the weave before they buy. The owners run it themselves, so the store had to work without a dedicated ecommerce manager.

The old site treated every saree as a line item: rows of near-identical thumbnails, no way to narrow by fabric or weave, and product pages that gave a price and little else. We rebuilt the listing page with filtering and sorting, added collection pages by weave type, and gave the product page a spec block covering colour, fabric, technique, the zari used and what comes with the piece.

The store now sorts by collection and by weave, so someone after a kora organza does not scroll past forty katan silks to find one. Every product page follows the same template, which makes listing new stock quicker and keeps the descriptions consistent. The announcement bar carries whatever is on at the time, and the restoration service has a page of its own rather than an old blog post.

Most of the traffic arrives on a phone. The mobile listing keeps filter and sort at the top rather than behind an icon, and the product images stay big enough to see the pattern. Gift cards sit in the catalogue like any other product. The owners edit the blog and the announcement bar themselves.