Responses by Michael Klim and Simon Wesierski, cofounders, Commerce-UI; and Melody Yung, creative lead, Yung Studio.

Background: The purpose of this site was to create a dynamic digital home for Lady Gaga—one that could celebrate her artistry, evolve with her vision and connect with her fans in real time. Her audience isn’t passive; they’re deeply invested and culturally fluent. So, the platform needed to feel alive, responsive and full of surprises. More than a website, it’s a creative system designed to grow with each album, drop and moment.

Design core: At its core, the site is built around modularity and movement. It fuses editorial storytelling, immersive shopping and interactive fan tools under one flexible system. The design takes cues from Gaga’s own visual language—bold, shapeshifting and never static—but uses restraint where needed to let her imagery, music and message lead. Elements like a vinyl-inspired scroll on the music page or customizable product grids are nods to physicality and fan control.

Favorite details: We’re proud of how much of Gaga’s personality made it into the microinteractions. “Load more” buttons pull from random lyrics. Mood lighting shifts on product pages. Even the loading states feel deliberate. But more than that, we’re proud of the pace. We shipped a dozen unique interactive album teasers and new content features before the album dropped and kept going after. The site behaves more like a product than a marketing page—and that’s by design.

Challenges: Designing a website for constant change. We weren’t just building a one-off launch site; we were designing an evolving platform without knowing what each drop, remix or surprise release would bring. It forced us to think in flexible systems—not fixed pages—and create a structure that could support both speed and experimentation.

Time constraints: Time constraints pushed us to prototype live. We often shipped updates before we had final assets—building placeholders, iterating fast and refining on the fly. It created a newsroom-like rhythm between content, design and development. That urgency became a feature—not a bug. It made the work sharper, more responsive and more collaborative than if we’d had months of lead time.

Navigation structure: We designed the navigation to feel fluid and frictionless—more like exploring an environment than clicking through a menu. We wanted fans to move seamlessly between music, merch, visuals and storytelling without feeling pulled out of Gaga’s world.

The nav adapts contextually: On landing pages, it fades into the background. On shop and archive pages, it becomes more structured. We also built in subtle scroll-based triggers and floating CTAs to guide fans without overwhelming them. Everything’s designed to keep them immersed.

Technology: The site is built on a headless Shopify architecture using Sanity as the CMS. This gave us the flexibility to customize content flows, localize product drops and update sections rapidly—often in real time. On the front end, we used React and Next.js for performance and scalability. We also leveraged WebGL and three.js for experimental interactions and visual effects.

Despite the range of bespoke features, we had to meet the highest performance standards—especially anticipating traffic spikes around major events like new project launches by Lady Gaga. This influenced every technical decision. At the heart of the project was the creation of a powerful, custom CMS designed to provide a modular editorial experience. This enables the artist’s team to build and publish any page, section or content layout they envision. Today, they actively manage and test multiple homepage versions—some using prebuilt CMS components, others fully custom-coded—working across teams in parallel before publishing the final selection.

We also implemented a robust video infrastructure to support the brand’s heavy use of high-quality video. The team can upload files in any size or format without worrying about compression or performance, ensuring a seamless, immersive media experience across devices.