Designing an E-Commerce Store as One System: The XF Nutrition Build
When I design an online store, I’m not really designing pages. I’m designing a system that happens to show up as pages. That distinction is easy to say and hard to hold onto, and the XF Nutrition project is a good example of why it matters.
Xtreme Fitness Nutrition is a premium, Texas-made supplement brand, and I took on the full store design through Eldritch Exchange. The line I built the identity around, Texas-made, performance-driven, built different, set the tone, and the real work was turning that tone into a coherent experience across every template a shopper touches: homepage, shop, category, product, a goals-based discovery page, plus about, blog, and contact. Here’s how I approached it as one system instead of eight separate designs.
Every page has a job, and they all belong to the same brand
The trap in e-commerce design is treating each page as its own project. You design a nice homepage, then a different-feeling category page, then a product page that looks like a cousin twice removed, and the store slowly reads as a collection of pages rather than a place. Shoppers feel that incoherence even when they can’t articulate it, and incoherence quietly erodes trust, which is the one thing an online store selling ingestible products can’t afford to lose.
So I started from a shared foundation. A consistent navigation and footer system, so a shopper always knows where they are and how to get anywhere else. A repeated visual language, the same type treatment, spacing logic, and component styles, so the homepage and a product page obviously come from the same brand. And a clear sense, on every template, of what that page is actually for. The homepage sets the impression and points people toward discovery. The category and product pages carry the detail. The about and contact pages build the human trust. Each has a distinct job, and all of them wear the same brand.
“Find Your Stack” as the connective thread
The idea that ties the whole store together is a recurring call to Find Your Stack. It shows up in the navigation, on the homepage, and as the on-ramp into deeper discovery, and it does something important: it gives a first-time visitor a single, confident next step instead of dropping them into an undifferentiated catalog.
That’s a small phrase doing structural work. A supplement store can be overwhelming, because a newcomer often doesn’t know a pre-workout from a recovery formula or which products go together. Find Your Stack turns that overwhelm into an invitation. It reframes the store from a shelf of products into a guide that helps you assemble the right combination for you, and because it repeats across the experience, it becomes a familiar handhold rather than a one-off button.
Components that scale past launch
Designing for a growing store means designing components, not compositions. A supplement brand adds flavors, drops new products, launches seasonal bundles, and refreshes collections constantly. If every one of those needs a bespoke layout, the store becomes a bottleneck and the consistency falls apart under deadline pressure.
So the product cards, the collection blocks, the featured-product rows, and the goal tiles were all built as reusable pieces with a shared grammar. New products slot into the existing system and look right by default. The Alpha Collection, the bundles and stacks, the best-sellers row, all of it draws from the same component set. That’s what lets the brand grow without redesigning itself every time it adds something, which for an e-commerce store is not a luxury but a survival requirement.
The physical and digital, joined up
One detail I enjoyed working in is that XF Nutrition isn’t only an online store. There’s a physical scoop bar, a real place you can walk into, and the site had to acknowledge that. So the experience makes room for the local, come-in-and-scoop side of the brand alongside the shop-online side, without letting either one feel bolted on. A brand that lives in both places has to feel like one brand in both, and the design system is what makes that possible.
What I’d take from it
The payoff of building XF Nutrition as a system is a store that feels like a place, not a pile of pages. A shopper moving from the homepage to a goal to a product to checkout experiences one continuous brand, with a consistent way to navigate, a recurring invitation to find their stack, and components that will keep looking right as the catalog grows.
The lesson I carry from it is the one I come back to on every store I design. The pages are just the visible surface. The real deliverable is the system underneath, the shared components, the consistent navigation, the connective idea, that lets a small brand look coherent today and stay coherent as it grows.
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