From the template trap to taste‑level branding.
Reimagining HMLC — Harsh Mann Luxury Consultancy — from a purple‑and‑gold generic template into a restraint‑driven, portfolio‑first digital presence that actually communicates what luxury looks like.
Fig. 00 · The thesis
When your work speaks luxury and your website shouts it — you’ve already lost the client. HMLC had the clients, the awards, and the craft. What they didn’t have was a digital presence that trusted any of it. Seven months to fix that contradiction.
01 — At a glance
A luxury branding agency whose website was doing the opposite of luxury.
HMLC is Harsh Mann Luxury Consultancy — a boutique brand strategy and design agency that's built premium identities for the likes of BMW, ITC and Kotak. By every metric that matters, they were the right agency for a luxury brand to hire. Their website was not.
The original site leaned into the visual shorthand of luxury: purple gradients, gold drop-shadows, a Playfair Display headline in all-caps. It communicated "we want to look expensive" — which is precisely what a luxury brand avoids. Clients referred by word of mouth frequently mentioned the site felt like a mismatch. The work was world-class. The window was a chain store.
My remit: make the digital presence match the quality of the work — without adding features, and without a single decorative flourish the work couldn't justify.
What I owned
- Problem framing & the redesign strategy
- Generative & evaluative research
- Information architecture & navigation
- Full visual system + component library
- End-to-end web design (desktop + mobile)
How I partnered
- Harsh Mann on brand voice & positioning
- Strategist on competitive landscape
- Dev on Webflow feasibility & animation
- 5 past clients on discovery interviews
- 3 prospective clients on first impressions
02 — The problem
A prospective luxury client decided to leave in under eight seconds. Here's the map of why.
I rebuilt the first-visit journey end to end — from how a client discovered HMLC to the moment they either made contact or bounced. The emotion curve didn't dip gradually. It fell off a cliff at the second scroll.
Three moments did the damage: a hero that screamed "generic luxury template", a portfolio buried three clicks deep, and a service list with no visual hierarchy. None of these are features. They're signals — and they were sending the wrong one.
Fig. 01 · Emotional journey, before
Reconstructed from 5 prospect interviews and session recordings. Red nodes are below the bounce line. The cliff is the hero scroll — if the homepage doesn't signal taste in the first eight seconds, a prospective luxury client is already gone.
03 — The old site
Three screens, three walls.
Each drop-off moment had a screen behind it. Lo-fi on purpose — at this stage, the argument is about signal and hierarchy, not pixels.
Before · Homepage
A confident agency using the language of discount luxury. Purple signals royalty; gold signals wealth. Together they signal: "this is a template." The portfolio — the only thing that actually converts a client — is invisible.
Before · Services
Nine offerings, identical gold diamonds, no story. A premium client scanning this page can't tell what makes HMLC different from any other agency — because nothing here makes that case.
Before · Portfolio
The thing that sells a branding agency — its work — was buried four clicks deep and showed two thumbnail images with no project names, client context, or outcome. A branding agency without visible branding is a paradox.
04 — Research & insight
I stopped asking how to make it look more luxurious, and started asking why it didn’t.
The instinct from the client brief was “make it feel more premium.” Research killed that framing. The problem wasn't that the site lacked premium cues — it was drowning in the wrong ones. Luxury, as the most prestigious brands practice it, is defined by what you leave out.
Four findings that reset everything
Luxury doesn’t announce itself
Every premium agency we benchmarked — Ragged Edge, Pentagram, Wolff Olins — used restraint: white space, minimal palette, no ornamentation. Purple gradients and gold drop-shadows are the visual language of aspirational luxury, not actual luxury.
The portfolio was the pitch
All six prospects said the same thing in different words: they decided to reach out based on seeing the work — not after reading the service descriptions. The portfolio was the conversion mechanism, and it was invisible on the homepage.
Confusion destroys trust faster than bad design
Users who couldn't find the portfolio in ten seconds assumed the agency lacked organisation. The navigation structure communicated the agency's internal thinking, not a client's mental model. Eight items in a nav bar is eight things to ignore.
The client roster was a hidden superpower
BMW. ITC. Kotak. 30+ brand names that a luxury client would immediately recognise as social proof — buried in the footer, rendered as tiny greyscale rectangles. Making these visible and prominent above the fold would change the conversation before a word was read.
One sentence from a prospect interview became the brief: “I assumed they were a small studio. Then I saw they’d worked with BMW and I called them immediately.” The problem wasn’t HMLC’s work. It was the order in which the website revealed it.
Fig. 02 · Primary persona
Not a demographic construct — a decision filter. Every design choice was checked against Priya: would this signal taste to someone whose entire business depends on getting taste right?
What clients said — before they saw the new site
Excellent work, confusing wrapper.
"Right from the Founder to every team member, there's warmth with a personal touch. The work? Extraordinary."
"They distilled the core philosophies… like a magic mirror that transformed my vague idea into a resilient, living vision."
"HMLC's branding services perfectly captured our fine-dine microbrewery's essence. Every detail, intentional."
05 — The reframe
If the work is luxury, the website must be too. And luxury, done right, is mostly absence.
This is where the project changed shape. We weren’t going to add more premium cues — we were going to remove the wrong ones entirely. Every element on the old site that “felt luxury” to a non-luxury audience was obscuring the thing that actually communicates luxury: the quality of the work itself.
Restraint. Portfolio first.
Let the clients do the selling.
Three principles shaped every decision from here:
White space is a luxury
Remove until it hurts, then remove one more element. Empty space costs confidence to deploy. It signals: we don't need to fill this. That's the feeling luxury brands charge for.
Work before words
The portfolio is the primary conversion mechanism. It goes at the top of the homepage, above the fold, before any copy makes a claim. The work proves the claim; the copy doesn't need to.
Social proof over self-promotion
BMW and ITC in the first scroll do more work than “India's Premier Luxury Agency” in a purple banner. Let the client roster speak. Make it impossible to miss.
Fig. 03 · Information architecture
Same capability, restructured. The left tree hides the portfolio behind three navigation decisions and buries social proof in the footer. The right tree puts the work where it converts — at the top — and makes the navigation a single-level decision.
06 — Colour & type
The old palette announced luxury. The new one is luxury.
The most important visual decision of the project was subtraction — removing the purple and gold that communicated “trying to look expensive” and replacing them with a palette that expensive brands actually use.
Fig. 04 · Palette shift
The before palette signals "luxury" to someone who's never worked with luxury. The after palette is used by the brands that define it. The delta isn't colour — it's the confidence to use almost none.
07 — Exploration
Five directions. One survivor.
Before committing, I sketched the homepage concept across five distinct directions — each testing a different hypothesis about what would resonate with Priya, our primary prospect.
Fig. 05 · Direction explorations
The winner led with the portfolio grid above the fold — work as the hero element. Typography and whitespace follow. The founder doesn't need to be centred; the client's brands do that job better.
08 — The redesign
The work leads. The words follow. The palette disappears.
The three walls, replaced. The homepage now opens on a portfolio grid and a client roster that names BMW before the first paragraph of copy. Services have one line each — enough to identify, not enough to confuse. The palette is black, off-white, and one warm accent that never dominates.
After · Homepage
No purple. No gold. No hero image. Just bold typography that occupies the space confidently, a portfolio grid that starts the second you stop reading the headline, and client logos that do the talking before any copy makes a claim.
After · Portfolio
Six named, tagged projects in a clean grid that starts above the fold. No "coming soon." No context missing. The dark background makes each project card feel like it's in a gallery — which is exactly the register this audience reads as premium.
After · Services
Nine services, nine rows, one line each. The generosity of the spacing communicates: we don't need to convince you. Numbered, not bulleted — each item earns its place. The copy tells you what the outcome is, not what the feature is.
09 — Before / after
The same agency. Minus the wrong signals.
Not a restyle — a subtraction. The clearest way to understand the redesign is to count what a first-time visitor no longer encounters.
Fig. 06 · The delta
Every row is a concept subtracted. The capabilities didn't change — HMLC still does all nine services, still has the same client roster, still led by the same founder. Only the order of revelation changed, and the language it spoke to get there.
10 — Impact
What we’d expect the rebrand to move.
A note I would make to any reviewer: this is a concept study, not a shipped product. These are directional hypotheses modelled from session recordings, competitor benchmarks, and conversion patterns in comparable agency rebrand case studies. They are things to test, not trophies.
Modelled bounce rate change
Prospects staying through the first portfolio scroll instead of bouncing at the hero
Session duration lift
From average 48 seconds to ~2.5 minutes — driven by portfolio exploration
Portfolio page engagement
Time on portfolio page — the primary conversion trigger for new client inquiries
Inquiry form submissions
Modelled lift in contact form completions, with portfolio-first structure
Client logos now visible in homepage scroll 2
BMW, ITC, Kotak and 27+ others — moved from footer footnote to primary social proof
Awards featured
Displayed prominently (previously mentioned only in FAQ)
Fig. 07 · Modelled outcome
The headline hypothesis: removing the wrong luxury signals and surfacing the work immediately roughly triples the average session duration, because the portfolio gives prospects a reason to stay. That dwell time is the precondition for a contact form submission.
11 — Reflection
What I’d carry into the next one.
- Restraint is a skill, not an absence. Deciding what to leave out requires more conviction than deciding what to add. The client's instinct was "make it feel more premium." Research proved the right move was to remove the things signalling premium-ness. That takes confidence to sell.
- The order of revelation is the product. HMLC's capabilities didn't change — the portfolio, the client roster, the services. What changed was when the visitor encountered each. That sequence is the actual UX, and it's the thing most agency websites get backwards.
- Social proof beats self-description every time. "India's premier luxury agency" in a purple banner never converted a sceptical luxury client. BMW in the first scroll did. The copy was the weakest thing on the page. The client list was the strongest. Swap the hierarchy.
- Luxury is a context, not a style. Purple and gold aren't luxury — they're the palette of aspirational luxury marketing. Actual luxury brands (LVMH, Hermès, Bottega Veneta) use black, cream, and restraint. If a luxury branding agency doesn't apply this principle to their own identity, why would a luxury brand trust them to apply it elsewhere?
If this were going to launch next
I'd instrument every portfolio click to understand which projects drive contact form submissions — and double down on showing those first. I'd A/B test the hero section between the current bold-type approach and a full-bleed portfolio image. I'd add case study depth to the top two or three projects: a brief, an insight, an outcome. And I'd treat every number on this page as a hypothesis to confirm with six weeks of live data, not a result.