Responses by Serhii Polyvanyi, creative director, Blacklead Studio.

Background: At its core, Serotoninn is a brand universe built around a very specific kind of woman—one who wears what she means, not what’s trending or got the most likes this week but what actually mirrors her energy, her mood and her sense of self on any given day. The brand lives somewhere between glam and grunge: bold silhouettes, tactile materials, a visual language that pulls from nightlife culture, underground fashion and cinema all at once.

When we sat down to build the site, the question was “How do we make someone feel something before they’ve even seen a single product?” The site had to carry the same attitude as the clothes. The same confidence, the same point of view. Otherwise, what’s the point of building anything at all? You’d just be selling things, and selling things is boring.

Design core: Everything moves. The site opens with a video preloader that sets the mood before anything else loads. The menu unfolds into a full-screen editorial moment—every category has its own dedicated video and imagery that activates as you move through it. Products scroll horizontally in a drag carousel that feels genuinely tactile in a way most shopping experiences really don’t bother to. Nothing sits still or looks like it came from a template someone paid twelve dollars for.

Typographically, the website’s design leans brutalist—sharp, confident fonts creating an architectural tension against rich, dark campaign photography. Hard and soft pull against each other throughout. Underneath all of that, there’s a full e-commerce layer: a favorites system, a real-time cart, size selection and category filtering. All of it feels invisible rather than intrusive; the commerce never fights the editorial. The whole experience is designed to feel less like browsing a catalog and more like stepping into a film for a while.

Challenges: Making it fast. The site is visually dense by design, with multiple full-screen videos, animated transitions, high-res campaign photography, interactive navigation and decorative details layered throughout. Every element is doing real work for the experience: setting tone, building atmosphere and communicating something about the brand. So cutting wasn’t really on the table. The brand demanded richness, and richness is heavy.

But beautiful and slow is frustrating to use. And we weren’t building for ideal conditions—we were building for a mid-range phone on mobile data in the middle of a city. That meant rethinking how and when everything loads, compressing video without visible quality loss, building animations that don’t punish lower-powered devices, and stress-testing everything across real-world scenarios rather than perfect ones. The goal was simple to describe and genuinely hard to execute: make it beautiful and fast without letting one lose to the other.

Navigation structure: We wanted the menu to feel like a mood-setter, not a utility. Most e-commerce navigation gets you where you’re going efficiently, and that’s about the whole ambition, which is fine! Functional is fine. But for Serotoninn, it would have been completely at odds with what the brand was trying to do. The brand isn't selling convenience: it’s selling a feeling, an aesthetic, a world. So the navigation needed to be part of that world, not a tool bolted onto the outside of it.

When you open the menu on Serotoninn, every category has its own video and imagery that activates as you move through. Before you’ve clicked on anything, you already understand the mood of that section. By the time you land on the Dresses or Corsets sections, you’re in the right headspace. The transition from navigation to collection feels like a continuation, not a hard stop and redirect. It changes how people explore: instead of navigating with purpose, they start navigating with curiosity. And for a fashion brand, curiosity is exactly the state you want someone in.

New lessons: This project reinforced that the best results come from being willing to wear more than one hat. Designer, developer, art director, content strategist—the roles blur when every layer of the experience is connected to every other one. Working across those silos, even when it’s uncomfortable and messy, is where the most interesting work actually happens. This project pushed us further in that direction than most, and we came out the other side thinking differently about how we collaborate.

Alternate paths: There were bumps and decisions that we’d look at differently in hindsight, but going back to do it “right” from the start would be a lot less interesting than what happened along the way. The moments where something didn’t work the way we expected or where he had to stop and find a completely different path—those were the moments where we grew. Experience is just accumulated mistakes you learn something from, and Serotoninn’s project gave us plenty of those to work with.