Magento 2 migration with persona-driven redesign

The Shirt Company is an independent luxury women’s fashion brand, based in London since 2007 and focused exclusively on women’s shirts and blouses. Their collections are designed for modern living: simple, elegant, and built to last. It’s a brand with a clear identity, a loyal customer base, and a product that speaks for itself.

Actuate had been working with The Shirt Company for years, maintaining their Magento 1 site with security updates and ongoing support. The relationship was well established and the team trusted us to keep things running.

But Magento 1 was reaching end of life, and the migration to Magento 2 couldn’t wait. Rather than treating it as a straight platform swap, we saw it as the opportunity it was, a chance to redesign the entire experience around the customer, capture the brand’s heritage whilst delivering something new, and build a platform ready to support the company’s growth ambitions, including expansion into international markets for the first time.

Fashion brands like this are the heart of our fashion ecommerce agency.

It’s easy to design a luxury fashion site that looks beautiful. The harder job is designing one that converts. We ran a series of discovery sessions with The Shirt Company to understand who their customers really were, not who the team assumed they were.

We used analytics data to challenge and refine those assumptions, creating detailed personas that would shape every design and UX decision. The wireframes and user journeys were built around these personas, with input from the team at every stage to ensure we were adding genuine value to the experience whilst keeping it effortless.

The build itself took three months, migrating all existing Magento 1 data, crafting the new design, integrating Glopal for international selling, upgrading to Stripe for mobile payments, and completing full QA testing and deployment.

Actuate had been working with The Shirt Company for years, maintaining their Magento 1 site. When the platform reached end of life, we treated the migration as a strategic opportunity rather than a technical chore. We ran discovery sessions to understand who the customers really were, using analytics data to challenge and refine assumptions, and created detailed personas that shaped every design and UX decision.

The build took three months, covering full data migration from Magento 1, a persona-driven redesign with enhanced size guides and significantly richer product imagery, streamlined navigation with clearer calls-to-action, and performance optimisations across every page. We integrated Glopal to handle multi-currency pricing and localised experiences, opening up international markets for the first time. Stripe was added for mobile payments, and the entire checkout was rebuilt to inspire the confidence that luxury fashion purchases demand.

In three months, The Shirt Company went from an ageing Magento 1 site to a modern, conversion-focused Magento 2 platform – with international capability built in from day one. The migration was a strategic step, and it delivered immediate commercial results and opened up a new market for the brand.