Japan House London Shop

Japan House London is a cultural destination showcasing the best of Japanese design, craft, and innovation. The goal was to evolve its e-commerce store into a richer, more flexible and commercially- effective platform, offering an upgraded visitor experience, seamless systems integration, and better administrative control – while ensuring alignment with JHLE’s distinct brand and cultural mission.

Key objectives included improved shop performance through design and UX optimisation, enhanced customer navigation and filtering, improved integration with Square for optimum product management, and richer media use of product imagery – along with building in a greater level of flexibility for in-house content management by the Japan House London team.

Refined and rationalised design and structure

We uplifted the site’s visual design, bringing consistency and better alignment with the main Japan House London site, and enhanced the design and function of key templates throughout the site, bringing in greater flexibility and consistency. 

The refreshed user interface design sees greater use of clean, stylised product photography, clearer signposting to categories and collections, refined and strengthened typographic styles, and subtle introduction of supporting colour to the core brand black and white in use. 

The global navigation now places full focus on retail categories for the user – more sales focused, and a departure from a confused navigation that was trying to be and do too much.

Technology and Integration

We retained WordPress/WooCommerce for continuity, performance, and cost-efficiency – but significantly upgraded the backend, refining the integration with Square for improved sync and product management. 

We integrated Algolia to deliver fast, intelligent search and dynamic filtering – greatly improving product discoverability and streamlining the user journey across the site. Cloudinary is used to optimise media management, enabling automated image resizing, faster load times, and enhanced visual quality – directly contributing to improved site performance and a richer retail experience.

Accessibility & performance

The site was redeveloped with an accessibility-first mindset, with WCAG AA compliance and delivering significant improvements in page speed and overall performance. Mobile and desktop load times were reduced through optimised media delivery, streamlined code, and improved infrastructure – contributing to better user experience, reduced bounce rates, and stronger SEO performance.

So what’s next?

As with any high-performing e-commerce platform, the work doesn’t stop at launch. We continue to evolve the site in close partnership with JHLE – iterating based on insight, refining the user experience, and introducing new features that drive long-term growth. Alongside commercial improvements, we’re enriching the platform with cultural and educational storytelling that deepens engagement and creates stronger alignment between the online shop, the main Japan House London website, and the physical experience of visiting the space for audiences.