Haus Dispatch #1
AVO in the house, the truth about free audits, and our apparent cat obsession.
TL;DR
Grab your morning coffee—the very first Haus Dispatch is live with an insider briefing on our latest client launches, store teardowns, and UX experiments. In this issue, we welcome our new partner AVO, break down how senior designers run free site audits to uncover conversion bottlenecks, and spotlight a custom Shopify migration for Alexia María that lifted PDP conversion rates by 15% and time on site by 30%. We also share our latest team obsessions, dive into our recent post on AI and design taste, and outline how to get these monthly briefings delivered straight to your inbox. From high-ticket e-commerce UX to the frontlines of DTC design, it’s everything we're obsessing over and building this month in one quick read.
Welcome to the very first edition of the Haus Dispatch!
Once a month (or so), we post a quick look at what we’re building, what we’re breaking, and valuable UX and design takeaways all bundled together in a format you can enjoy while you sip your morning coffee.
You can get the Haus Dispatch delivered directly to your inbox by subscribing here.
This Dispatch, we're sharing a toast to our friends at AVO, info on free site audits, a look into recent work, current obsessions, and more.
Let’s dive in.
Welcome to the Haus, AVO!
We’re stoked to officially announce our new partnership with AVO.
If you aren't familiar, AVO sits at the intersection of premium, butter-soft loungewear and collegiate sports apparel. They’re ditching the stiff, generic bookstore blanks everyone wore to class 10 years ago and are replacing them with cloud-knit fabrics and modern silhouettes. The best part? 20% of every AVO order is donated to female student-athlete NIL funds at their partner universities.
We’re teaming up with AVO to sharpen their digital footprint, elevate their user flows, and help them build mental market share as they scale across campuses nationwide.
What we love about their mission: They understand that college-branded gear shouldn't feel like a cheap souvenir—it should be cool and comfortable and support your school and the people who make it special. Keep an eye out for new digital drops and fresh storefront features coming soon.
Why (and how) we do free site audits.
Most e-commerce brands are sitting on technical debt that they’ve simply grown blind to. When you look at your own website every single day, you stop noticing the small bugs, clunky navigation, and slow-loading pages that erode your conversion rates.
Paohaus site audits are completed by our senior designers and engineers and focus on three key areas:
- UX & Layout Friction: Identifying where users get confused, drop off, or hit roadblocks in your purchase funnel.
- Technical & Speed Health: Checking for unoptimized code, app bloat, and performance bottlenecks that slow down your site experience.
- Brand: Evaluating whether your digital storefront actually reflects the quality of the physical product you’re selling.
Why do we do it for free? It’s the best way to start a real conversation. You get real, actionable feedback from people who build Shopify sites for a living. If you want us to help you fix what we find, awesome. If you take our notes and fix it in-house, that’s great too.
Want us to take a look under the hood of your store? Click below or hit reply to this email with your URL and we'll get you in the queue.
Alexia María: Case study spotlight.
When luxury eveningwear house Alexia María first came to us, their gowns were dressing red carpet icons like Ariana Grande and Gwen Stefani, but their website backend was running on an old WordPress setup. Selling made-to-order gowns meant managing over 100 variants per product across custom fabrics, sizing, and silhouettes—a level of catalog complexity that their site simply couldn't handle without slowing to a crawl during massive, celebrity-driven traffic spikes.
We migrated the brand to a custom, component-based Shopify architecture, completely rethinking the PDP layout and engineering a digital swatch experience so shoppers could interact with fabric options in real time. The rebuild delivered a 15% lift in PDP conversion rate and a 30% increase in time on site—proving that high-end editorial storytelling and high-performance e-commerce engineering belong in the exact same system.
Our current obsessions.
- The music of Final Fantasy X—which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, as it happens.
- Virgin Dirty Shirley Maeve Chocolate Bars—for our fellow DCC fans, there's also a Princess Donut flash mini game behind that link.
- Moleskin 18-month weekly planners—it's that time of year again. We love keeping physical planners on our desks. Writing by hand just hits different.
- Writech Pens—speaking of writing by hand, we firmly believe these are some of the best pens on the market right now. Perfect glide every time.
- Bongo Cat—this little game (available on Steam for free!) keeps us company while we tap away. Bonus points if you set up a multiplayer lobby with your coworkers.
- Boys of Tommen Book Series—we literally can't stop thinking about this book series. Looking for your next book club read? Look no further.
- Pomocat App—available for Android and iOS, this free, cat-themed pomodoro timer app is simple, cute, and works exactly as you'd want it to. Do we have a cat problem? This month's picks certainly seem to imply that we do.
Our latest post made waves (ha).
If you follow along with Paohaus on socials, you may have already seen our latest blog post, The Sea of Sameness, which delves into why truly iconic brands cannot be built on AI prompts and why designers and studios are more relevant than ever.
In this post, we argue that while AI is a fantastic tool, it's a terrible designer. One of the key problems with using AI as your core brand builder is the very nature of artificial intelligence models, which are aggregates that optimize for the average.
No one wants their brand to be average, but AI is "free" so we're seeing an increasing number of brands settling for the best result they can pull from their Agent. These brands end up looking, feeling, and sounding average at best (they fall into AI Slop territory at worst).
If everyone is doing it, why does it hurt your brand to follow suit? We'll leave it to our pal Syndrome to explain this one.
In short, design studios aren't relevant because they can make things. We're relevant because we have the taste to know what not to make.
Check out the aforementioned blog post ->
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Catch you next time!
