A catalogue that loads before you notice it

Atelier Marchand sells to designers and hotel groups. Their photography is the product, and it was also the problem: the old site shipped forty megabytes of images on the first screen and scored in the low twenties on mobile performance.

The studio was blunt about the cost. Buyers were asking for PDFs, which meant the catalogue was going stale in inboxes and the studio had lost track of who was looking at what.

We rebuilt the front end around a strict rule: nothing loads that is not on screen, and nothing on screen loads larger than it renders.

Every photograph is served in modern formats at the exact widths the layout uses, with a low-resolution placeholder that matches the image's own colour so the page never flashes white. Below-the-fold imagery and the filter logic load only when needed. The type and layout ship first, so the page is readable long before it is complete.

Alongside that we built a small design system, sixteen components with fixed spacing and type scales, so the studio can add a collection without a developer and without the layout drifting.

Mobile performance moved from the low twenties into the high nineties, and the first screen now renders in well under a second on a throttled connection.

The measurable outcome the studio cares about is simpler: pages per session roughly doubled, and requests for PDF catalogues stopped almost entirely. Buyers send links to each other now.