The brief
Ember & Co. makes cast-iron pans the way their grandfather did, poured, seasoned, and sold with a lifetime warranty nobody has ever had to use. Their old site looked like every other cookware storefront: white background, hero product shot, three lifestyle photos of a kitchen nobody actually cooks in. It wasn't wrong. It just wasn't true to what the product feels like in your hand.
The founders didn't ask for a redesign. They asked why a $340 pan felt cheaper on their own website than it did in a customer's kitchen.
What we built
Instead of another photo grid, we built a WebGL material shader that responds to scroll, the same rough-cast texture and slow oil sheen you see when you actually turn one of these pans in the light. Product photography still exists on the site, but it's secondary, the shader carries the hero and the category pages. Copy shrank by two-thirds. What was left had to earn its place next to something that heavy.
"We stopped trying to describe what the iron feels like and just let people watch it catch the light instead."
Priya Reddy, Creative Director, Kiln Studio
The hardest part wasn't the shader, it was resisting the urge to add motion everywhere once we had one good moment. The homepage has exactly one continuously moving element. Everything else waits for a hover.
What happened
The storefront held through a 3x traffic spike on launch day, driven by a single retailer newsletter feature.
product photos used on the homepage. The shader carries it alone.
from kickoff to launch, including two rounds of foundry site visits.
Ember & Co. is still selling the same pans. What changed is that the site finally argues for them the way the founders do in person, unhurried, a little proud, and willing to let the material speak before the copy does.