DE BEERS
Elevating digital luxury through editorial
experience and product focus
2024 – 2025 Poppins Agency
The Challenge:
Guide and support De Beers in their digital transformation and the optimisation of key business decisions within their global e-commerce experience, across multiple languages and markets. At the same time, preserving the elegance and prestige of their iconic position in the luxury jewellery industry.
Context
De Beers Jewellers is a global leader in fine and high jewellery, where e-commerce, UX, and creative come together to reflect the quality and craftsmanship of the brand. The digital experience is designed to uphold the highest standards, aligning seamlessly with the brand’s heritage and product offering.
The customer journey spans both digital and physical touchpoints, with users often moving between the website and in-store experience as they consider a purchase. As a challenger brand in the fine jewellery space, strong brand storytelling and considered content play a central role, sitting alongside rather than behind the e-commerce experience.
My role:
I worked as a Product Designer across key areas of the De Beers digital experience, partnering closely with stakeholders to evolve both editorial and product journeys. This included redesigning the World of De Beers editorial section to improve discoverability, better structure long-form content, and create a more immersive storytelling experience.
I also contributed to the optimisation of the top navigation and product pages, alongside designing layouts and interactions for the High Jewellery collections; elevating De Beers’ most exceptional pieces while supporting exploration and enquiry. In parallel, I contributed in refining the homepage content hierarchy and entry points to better balance editorial narratives with product-led journeys.
The work was delivered through an ongoing partnership, responding to evolving briefs and incorporating continuous feedback and refinement to ensure the experience remained cohesive, considered, and effective.
Design System & Style Guide
The in-house design system had been poorly managed for years, so we created a new, fully organised Figma file to consolidate and clean up all brand decisions made over time. The result is a robust component library with multiple instances and variants adaptable to different scenarios, as well as an automated style guide covering colours, typography, and icons (re-designed by Poppins).
This new structure has significantly improved collaboration across the organisation. Any employee can now access a centralised Figma file containing brand guidelines, the latest web design pages, and insights from recent creative workshops, making workflows more efficient and transparent.
Top Navigation
We redesigned the header and top navigation to better reflect the complexity of the business and to guide users seamlessly across collections, product lines, marketing pages, and key functional areas of the website. Moving away from a traditional static top navigation, we introduced a side menu that functions almost like a sitemap, offering a more intuitive browsing experience.
Because imagery plays a fundamental role in helping users understand the key parts of the business, we integrated hover interactions that preview each section. This not only improves recall but also makes future navigation easier and more intuitive.
The new structure also brought essential functionality to the forefront, such as language and currency selectors (previously hidden), FAQs, and a store locator. Ensuring both online and in-store operations are better supported.
The World of De Beers
The editorial section represents a balance between storytelling and simplicity. For De Beers, it was important that the editorial experience felt as refined and considered as the rest of the site, reflecting the brand’s heritage and craftsmanship while remaining easy to navigate.
We reworked the structure of the section to make it clearer and more intuitive, helping users move naturally between stories and related content. Each article was redesigned with a stronger sense of flow, using thoughtful pacing, elegant typography, and immersive imagery to create a more engaging reading experience. Navigation was streamlined and layouts made more flexible, allowing new stories and collection launches to be introduced seamlessly over time.
The result is a more cohesive and elevated editorial space — one that strengthens brand storytelling while fitting effortlessly within the wider digital journey.
Product Listing Page (PLP)
The product listing pages represented a major evolution of the platform. Built to support multilingual content and a complex catalogue structure, they combine functionality with a refined, minimal aesthetic. Filters, sorting tools, slideshow product cards and a flexible grid system work together to create a seamless browsing experience. Developed in close partnership with the in-house development team, the new PLP improves product discoverability and strengthens conversion to the product detail pages, where purchasing decisions take shape.
Product Detail Page (PDP)
The product detail page was designed to balance clarity with elegance. Three distinct product categories: High Jewellery, Fine Jewellery and Bridal. Each with its own visual language, yet unified within a cohesive customer journey. Informed by user interviews and shaped through close collaboration with the in-house research and stakeholder teams, the PDP’s introduce structured sections and fluid scrolling interactions that reveal information with intention. The result is a more engaging experience with the scrollable gallery now one of the most used features.
Solution
For De Beers, we at Poppins delivered a considered digital transformation that elevated the global e-commerce experience while preserving the elegance and prestige of the brand. By refining the information architecture, redesigning core journeys, and rebuilding the design system from the ground up, we created a more intuitive and scalable platform across markets, languages, and currencies.
The impact was measurable. Product page retention increased by 5% within six months, with key interactive components driving deeper engagement. The redesigned navigation improved discoverability across collections and functional pages, supporting smoother movement between inspiration and purchase. The new design system streamlined collaboration across teams, reduced design inefficiencies, and established a clear foundation for future launches and optimisation. Together, these improvements strengthened engagement, supported conversion to product detail pages, and reinforced the brand’s position as a leader in luxury digital experience.
