The One Glove is a specialist goalkeeper glove brand trusted by elite athletes, including Premier League professionals. Since 2021, Studio Portolan has partnered with The One Glove as a creative partner, supporting the evolution of their digital experience to better reflect product quality, performance credibility, and market leadership.
The focus of this phase was to take an already successful eCommerce store and significantly improve the UI, UX, and on-site journey — ensuring consistency, clarity, and a seamless experience from first interaction through to purchase.
My role centred on improving the overall user experience while building a scalable, reusable design system that could support ongoing growth. The objective was clear: establish The One Glove as the leading brand in its niche by aligning performance-driven UX with a confident, premium brand presence.
Beyond core shopping flows, we identified opportunities to deepen engagement and retention through new supporting pages. I designed a highly engaging Rewards page with a retro-inspired art direction, alongside Partners and Pros pages to showcase Premier League athletes, brand partnerships, and events — reinforcing credibility, trust, and community around the brand. Significant time was also spent improving PDP structure to better communicate value and increase conversion.
The project was delivered in structured phases, beginning with high-impact pages including the Product Display Pages, Collection Pages, Site Navigation, Rewards Page, and Homepage. I began with market-leader research across sports and lifestyle brands such as Nike, Adidas, and Gymshark to understand familiar user journeys and navigation patterns, ensuring intuitive usability. This was followed by competitor analysis within the goalkeeper niche, with the goal of clear differentiation and category leadership.
Each page was designed within a comprehensive design system, covering typography hierarchy, colour palette, iconography, and component states. Introducing the system early allowed components to be reused consistently across the site. SEO considerations were balanced carefully with user experience — breaking content into digestible sections and progressive disclosure patterns to serve both customers and search engines. Once designs were finalised, I produced a detailed handover document to support smooth developer implementation.
This phase delivered a customer-focused, conversion-led redesign across The One Glove’s most important pages, strengthening brand clarity and setting the foundation for long-term growth. While the designs were completed toward the end of the year and scheduled for phased implementation in early 2022, the work positioned the brand for measurable improvements in engagement, conversion, and retention.
The project reinforced the importance of combining competitive research, strong design systems, and performance-led UX to help niche brands stand out — not just visually, but strategically — within a crowded market.
Whether you have a clear brief, a loose idea, or just a sense that something isn’t quite clicking, it starts with a conversation.
A focused 30-minute call to understand your product, your goals, and your customers. From there, we shape the positioning, clarify the journey, and design an experience built to convert.
No pitch deck. No pressure. Just clear thinking, a defined outcome, and a path forward that makes sense for your business.
