Luce Sposa

Client

Luce Sposa is a Ukrainian designer wedding dress brand, founded in 2016, that sells to boutiques and showrooms across Europe, the USA, and the Middle East on a combined B2B + B2C model. Its catalog spans 500+ SKUs across seasonal collections, and its audience ranges from professional B2B buyers browsing on showroom tablets to individual brides discovering the brand on their phones.

Key Highlights

Challenge

The brand had a strong offline and Instagram presence, but its online catalog didn't yet match the quality of the product itself. To keep expanding internationally and win professional B2B buyers, Luce Sposa needed a website that could convey the premium feel of the dresses — the way the fabric moves and catches light — as convincingly as an in-person fitting.

That created a challenge that was simple to state but hard to solve: combine "wow" design with high speed. Premium dress photography means macro shots that capture fabric texture (over 2 MB each), complex GSAP and Lottie animations, and dozens of devices — from 4K showroom monitors to budget smartphones. Get the architecture wrong, and the site either loses its magic and fails to convey the refinement, or it stalls on older phones.

The stakes were commercial, not just aesthetic. During collection launches (twice a year) and the wedding season, a single lost B2B lead is worth $200–500 per order — and because the animation and preloader are part of the brand experience, losing that "wow" directly hurts conversion.

In the brand owner's words:

Our old PDF lookbooks are not "wow" — they are "wait." Buyers just scrolled past. We need a website that conveys the fabric movement like a real model — and that they won't close after 5 seconds of loading.

Solution

We built the catalog on an SSR + CDN-first approach: Nuxt 3 (SSR) for fast rendering and SEO, a Laravel API for content and catalog, and adaptive images (srcset) plus a CDN that serve each device exactly the image size it needs.

The central decision was to optimize the experience rather than strip it down — and we weighed the obvious shortcuts against it deliberately:

• Not a static, animation-free catalog — the animation is the product; it's how fabric movement reaches a buyer who can't touch the dress, so removing it would defeat the site's purpose.
• Not an off-the-shelf website builder — builders can't deliver custom GSAP/Lottie performance tuning or 65 tested layout scenarios without breaking under heavy imagery.
• Not client-side rendering alone — international expansion needed strong SEO and fast first paint, which SSR provides and pure CSR does not.
• Not separate "lite" mobile versions — a single adaptive codebase keeps the premium experience identical everywhere and avoids the cost and drift of maintaining two products.

Instead, we tamed the effects: rendering animations in stages (lightweight Lottie first, heavier GSAP after), with a preloader that creates a smooth entry into the brand without blocking the main thread. For B2B buyers who return often, PWA caching lets previously visited catalog pages open fast even on a weak connection.

Process

We treated this as a domain problem before a code problem, and ran the engagement in clear stages:

1. Discovery. We immersed ourselves in the bridal domain, surveyed businesses to understand what B2B buyers notice first and where their pain points are, and ran a detailed client briefing to identify which dress models are most in demand.
2. Content foundation. Based on that, we prepared specifications for the photoshoot, so the imagery itself would support the intended web experience — and only then moved to building the site.
3. Build. A team of 1 Frontend (Nuxt/Vue), 1 Backend (Laravel), 1 DevOps, 1 PM, and QA delivered the catalog over ~3.5 months, with performance and animation integrity checked at every stage.
4. Delivery automation. We set up a CI/CD pipeline and a structured content workflow so the team could ship collection updates safely, without manual redeployments.

Result

We delivered a premium, fast catalog that expanded Luce Sposa's market reach and improved buyer experience across all devices:

• Speed. First Contentful Paint improved from ~2.8s to 1.2s on 3G; Mobile PageSpeed stays above 75 despite the rich graphics.
• Traffic savings. Adaptive images and CDN cut bandwidth costs by 25% compared with the original 5K-scale images, and image processing moved to an automated pipeline.
• Stability. 99.95% uptime. Thanks to PWA caching, returning buyers can still open previously cached catalog pages and assets even on a weak connection.
• Release cadence. With the new CI/CD pipeline and content workflow, deploy frequency grew from once every two weeks to twice a week for collection updates.

In buyers' own words — a B2B buyer in a showroom:

I open the site on my tablet — the animation is just as smooth as on my large monitor, no dropped frames.

A B2C user:

Scrolling through the dresses, I can literally feel the fabric move through the animation.