Ountodun

Ountodun’s initial setup was essentially a blank canvas. The business had a name, a Shopify account, and a concept for a curated store — but no finalized products, no existing visual identity, and no established design system.

The initial budget was ₦80,000, and I was also involved beyond pure design, helping develop ideas and supporting parts of the communication around the project.

This created a slightly unusual design challenge. Rather than receiving a complete brief with established products, photography and brand guidelines, I had to help shape the visual direction from the information available.

The core challenge was not simply making a Shopify store look better. It was defining what Ountodun should look and feel like before the business had enough physical material to define itself.

The store needed to feel:

At the same time, the identity needed to work beyond the website, eventually extending into social media, product presentation and photography.

I researched a broad range of concept stores and African-focused brands to understand how different businesses approached curation, cultural references, product presentation and contemporary luxury. Brands such as ALÁRA Lagos, This Is Us, and Good NG became part of the reference landscape, alongside other concept stores and independent brands.

The goal wasn’t to reproduce any particular reference. Instead, I looked for the common principles behind them: How can a store feel distinctly African without becoming visually predictable? How can multiple products live within one visual world? How can warmth and cultural character coexist with a contemporary ecommerce experience?

From that research, I developed a direction around four ideas:

With no existing identity to work from, I developed the core visual system for Ountodun:

A major part of the project was making sure the identity could actually function as a brand. I developed supporting applications including brand guidelines, social media templates, brand mockups, product presentation direction, and photography direction.

The photography direction was particularly important because the eventual store would depend heavily on product imagery. Rather than treating photography as an afterthought, I considered how lighting, composition, backgrounds and framing could contribute to the overall brand language.

The objective was to make the products and the environment around them feel like part of the same curated world.

Once the identity had been established, I translated the system into the ecommerce experience. The Shopify store became the first major digital application of the brand, designed to feel more like a curated editorial space than a generic ecommerce template:

One of the interesting parts of the project was working within an existing ecommerce platform rather than designing an entirely custom storefront. Shopify provides the underlying infrastructure, but the challenge is making a template feel like your brand rather than Shopify’s template.

I worked within those constraints to adapt the storefront’s visual language, including typography, spacing, colour treatment, product presentation, and supporting interactions. This required thinking about both sides of the problem: What should the customer experience? and What can the business realistically maintain?

Ountodun ultimately did not progress into a full commercial launch under the original project timeline. As a result, there are no meaningful sales, conversion or customer metrics to present, and I don’t treat the project as a commercially validated ecommerce success.

Instead, the value of the project is in the design work itself: taking an early-stage concept with almost no established visual infrastructure and developing it into a cohesive identity and ecommerce direction. It became an exercise in designing the world around a business before the business had fully formed.