Pastoral Threads
Pastoral Threads: Building a cottagecore fashion store on Squarespace
Pastoral Threads is a clothing brand I designed around a specific aesthetic: cottagecore, fairycore, and folk-inspired pieces. The kind of clothes I'd want to find in a shop that doesn't quite exist yet. Rural, handmade-feeling, a bit wild. The kind of thing you'd wear to walk through a meadow or sit in an old stone kitchen and feel entirely yourself.
The brief was to build the entire digital presence from scratch. Not just a shop, but a world that the clothing lives inside. I chose Squarespace because the design tools are strong enough to create something with real atmosphere without needing a developer. The homepage uses parallax scrolling to layer imagery with depth, so browsing the site feels closer to turning pages in a book than scrolling a product grid. Each collection has its own visual language within the broader brand. The product pages are clean and let the photography do the work, with enough white space that the clothes breathe.
The navigation is deliberately simple. Someone arriving from Instagram or a search engine should understand what this brand is within five seconds and find what they're looking for within ten. I stripped out anything that created friction between arriving and browsing.
Behind the visible design, the SEO was built in from the start. Every product and collection page has hand-written meta descriptions targeting specific search terms: people searching for cottagecore dresses, folk-inspired clothing, fairycore fashion. The keywords are chosen based on what this audience actually searches for, not what sounds good in a brief. Alt text on every image. Schema markup where it matters. The goal is organic discoverability over time rather than dependence on paid traffic or social algorithms.
The site also includes a newsletter signup (community building starts before the first sale) and an integrated Instagram feed that pulls the social presence directly into the shopping experience. When the store goes live, a visitor can move from discovering the brand on Instagram to browsing the full collection to purchasing without leaving the ecosystem.
The store is currently hidden while the collection is being finalised, but the site itself is live and serving as the brand's public face. The foundation is built to support growth: adding new collections, seasonal lookbooks, and editorial content without needing to restructure anything.
Explore the full website by clicking below:
Do you have a brand new website project in mind? Do you require a site audit or a design refresh?
I’d be delighted to discuss your website requirements with you. After an initial discussion followed by the collection of some further details, I then provide a no-obligation proposal document for your consideration.