MAS Monograms

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The brief

MAS Monograms is a home-based custom embroidery studio run by Mary Ann Stone in St. Matthews, South Carolina. Every piece is made to order: the font, thread color, placement, and stitch count all change from one customer to the next, and each of those choices moves the price. The first site I built for her lived on Squarespace and worked around that reality with a quote-first flow, educate first, quote second, collect payment third.

That site did its job. What it could not do was keep up with where the studio was headed. Mary Ann was paying a monthly platform fee for a site she did not really own. The template put clip-art category icons where her actual finished work should have been. The built-in form could only ask so much, so quotes still needed a round of back-and-forth. And the whole thing was slower than it needed to be.

She wanted to keep the quote-first strategy, because it fits handmade work, and move everything else onto something faster, more custom, and hers.

←BeforeAfter→

The approach

We kept the strategy and rebuilt the foundation. The new site runs on Astro, with content in Sanity and hosting on Cloudflare, so it ships as fast static pages and belongs to Mary Ann outright, with no monthly platform rent.

The redesign leads with proof. Where the old category grid used small clip-art icons, the new one uses real photographs of Mary Ann’s finished pieces, so a customer browsing tote bags or baby gifts sees the actual quality of the stitching before they read a word. That same real work carries the hero, the shop, and the Style Gallery.

Content lives in Sanity, split the way a one-person studio actually works. I handle the structure and the heavier changes, and Mary Ann can make the light edits herself, adding a piece to the gallery or nudging a price, without wrestling a page builder or waiting on a template.

The quote-first flow stayed, and the form that ends it got a real upgrade.

What we built

The full build, including the pieces above:

• Astro front end hosted on Cloudflare, shipped as static pages Mary Ann owns
• Sanity CMS for the gallery, categories, and pricing, set up for shared editing: I handle the structure, Mary Ann makes the light updates
• Shop organized by seven item categories, from tote bags and towels to baby gifts, each with real photography and starting prices, plus a “Bring Your Own Item” path for customers shipping in their own fabric
• Style Gallery of real finished work, browsable and linked straight into the quote flow
• Custom quote form covering item, ownership, personalization, monogram style, placement, size, thread colors, font, timeline, and reference photo uploads
• Font and Lettering Guide and a Thread Color Chart, so customers reach the form already fluent in the options
• Pricing page and a four-step How It Works: browse, request, quote, stitch
• About page telling Mary Ann’s story as a maker, positioning the studio as a personal craft operation, not a fulfillment warehouse
• Privacy, terms, and accessibility pages, matching the professional footing of the rest of the site