How Premium Interactive Gave Edwin Pireh’s Silk Collection a Responsive Luxury Makeover

Background

Melbourne-based Edwin Pireh crafts handmade silk ties and scarves for customers seeking a premium accessory. Faced with the need for a digital storefront that mirrored the brand's upscale feel, they partnered with Premium Interactive. The goal was clear: keep a responsive foundation while building a unique luxury shopping experience using a prebuilt WooTheme.

With a focus on handcrafted quality, the business needed an online environment that would support high-resolution photography, let visitors zoom in on fine silk details, and give a feeling of exclusivity. Standard storefronts felt too generic, but building from scratch would add months to the schedule. Athena's minimalist base offered the compromise—core mechanics in place, ready for styling.

Design Phase and Planning

Rather than start from code, the team captured full-page screenshots of the Athena theme and opened them in Adobe Photoshop. By setting guides to match existing margins and content areas, they mapped out adjustments down to the pixel. This step helped decide image sizes, spacing, and the precise scale for a 100% width homepage slider.

During this stage, the interactive team also defined a consistent color palette drawing from the client's scarf patterns. Rollover overlays and button states were given custom RGBA values to tie in with signature brand hues. This upfront planning saved hours of trial and error in the code editor by ensuring every element had a clear visual reference in Photoshop mockups.

Making the Slider Fully Responsive

With the mockup in hand, they inspected the theme's CSS in Google Chrome DevTools. It turned out that changingwidth: autotowidth: 100%on the.slide-media imgselector was all it took to make each slide adapt to any browser width. Exporting Photoshop slices at the guide dimensions then created crisp images ready for the live slider.

#featured-slider .slide-media img {\n  display: block;\n  margin: 0 auto;\n  width: 100%;\n}

Rather than rely on default theme animations, a lightweight JavaScript fallback was used for older browsers that don't support CSS flexbox. The goal was to keep the core modification as simple as possible while maintaining a fallback. Today, the slider stretches edge-to-edge on desktop, tablet, or phone with no distortion or cropping of the silk tie visuals.

Custom Shop Page Layout

Next, attention turned to the product catalog. In WooCommerce settings the Catalog Images were set to 230×230 pixels and the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin was run to avoid blur. Then custom.css overrides defined a four-column grid, hover backgrounds, and title shadows to present an elegant, consistent layout.

For the product titles and prices, extra spacing was handled by adding specific CSS properties. A subtle text-shadow under titles makes them easier to read against patterned backgrounds. Hover states now reveal a semi-transparent panel with call-to-action links, enhancing engagement without interrupting the clean layout.

Optimizing for Mobile

Inside the@media only screen and (max-width: 768px)block, desktop rules were overwritten so that product tiles become two columns. Width adjustments, margins, and padding were fine-tuned until the shop page looked tidy on smartphones without extra plugins or child themes.

Testing involved actual devices on iOS and Android to check tap targets and scroll behavior. The team noticed an unexpected white gap at the bottom of product images on iPhone 6. A quick fix resetting the body margin solved it. This real-device QA confirmed that the site performed reliably under real-world browsing conditions.

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• Changedwidth: 24.5%towidth: 50%for product containers
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• Removed left margin withmargin-left: 0 !important
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• Adjusted hover overlay width and padding for touch-friendly taps
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Results and Reflection

By mixing Photoshop planning with focused CSS overrides, Premium Interactive delivered a site that feels bespoke without rewriting theme templates. The client gained a fast, scalable, and luxury-ready storefront that highlights each silk tie and scarf, desktop to mobile.

The total development time was under two weeks, thanks to the decision to keep theme updates intact. Future updates from WooThemes can be applied without losing custom.css overrides. The project balanced speed with design, and the client saw immediate improvements in session duration and bounce rates after launch.