Hats made by hand, sold through a storefront built in 2018.

Experience

A shopper's path from the homepage to the cart, on desktop and on a phone. The custom-hat configurator is where the business lives, and it is the least supported page on the site.

Homepage

• No value proposition above the fold on desktop. Visitors scroll three screens to reach the workshop banner.
• The featured grid shows twelve felt hats, all priced from the same number, with the style name as the only difference. No hover state, no quick view, no explanation of what a Gus is next to a Cattleman.
• Social proof is one unattributed quote from "Amy B." No review count, no press, no rating. The Shopify Product Reviews app is still referenced in the markup but renders nothing; Shopify retired it in 2024.
• No shipping, returns, lead time or guarantee appears anywhere except the policy pages. The phone number in the top bar is the site's one trust signal.
• The homepage is 5,689px tall on desktop and 5,271px on a phone. The two full-bleed bands are 800 to 1,050px each.

Navigation and structure

1. 

   UX1High

   The desktop dropdown never opens

   The markup holds a 21-item submenu under Custom Felt Hats, from Gus to Charlie Waite. Its list is set to display none and no hover rule shows it. Two seconds of hovering produces an underline and nothing else. Shoppers cannot discover a single style from the navigation.

   Fix. Either restore the dropdown, ideally as style tiles with photos, or remove the dead markup.

2. 

   UX2Medium

   Three clicks to a felt hat, through a hub that shows no prices

   Custom Felt Hats opens a hub of 21 style tiles. Each tile opens a style collection. Each collection opens a product. The tiles carry no price and no description. The breadcrumb reads Page 1 of 3 although no pagination renders; pages 2 and 3 exist and are identical. On the product page the breadcrumb reads Home, Products, Silverbelly Gus, so the style context is lost again. The nav label Find Your Fit opens a page titled Felt Hat Guide, and a quiz results page exists in the sitemap with no quiz linking to it.

   Fix. Put "from $389" and a one-line crease note on every tile, or make the hub one filterable grid of all 53 felt hats. Align the nav label with the page title.

Collections

• Style collections use Boost filters for colour and collection with counts. That works. Sort is missing on collections and present only on search.
• Cards show image, name and a "from" price. No swatches, no customisable badge, no alternate image, no quick add. Names like "Saddle Tan Gus 2" and "Black Gus 2" read as duplicates.
• On a phone the grid is two columns with 140px images cropped square from 4 by 3 sources, so brims get cut.
• Most collections have no description text. Straw Hats, Gus, Clearance and Kids each have zero words, so nothing explains a 10X against a 100X or a Gus against a Cattleman.

Search

1. 

   

   UX3High

   Search prices a hat at ₱389 that the collection prices at ₱24,800

   Boost search renders the US dollar amount with the visitor's local currency symbol. Shopify Markets converts the collection page correctly. The same Black Gus therefore appears sixty times cheaper in search than on the shelf. For any shopper outside the United States this reads as a broken store.

   Fix. Turn on Boost's Markets currency support, or switch off automatic conversion. Then confirm the US dollar view from a US session.

Product page and the configurator

1. 

   

   UX4High

   Twelve fields, six of them required, none of them pre-filled or explained

   Eight dropdowns, two checkboxes, a notes box and a file upload. Six dropdowns are required and open on a "Choose" placeholder, even where the copy above states the pictured values, such as a 5 3/4 inch standard crown and a 4 inch standard brim. Choosing 20X quality moves the price from ₱24,800 to ₱35,000 with no explanation of the tiers. The colour, size and oval guides are links that leave the page, and the selections with them. Choosing Black changes nothing on screen. On a phone the Add to Cart button sits 1,961px down, about two and a third screens, with no sticky bar.

   Fix. Three steps: quality as four cards with price and fur blend, fit with an inline size guide, then style pre-filled with the pictured standards. Colour swatches as images. A live summary line and a sticky Add to Cart on mobile.

Cart and checkout

• Add to Cart navigates to the full cart page. Acceptable for a single hat; a drawer would help accessories.
• Options are listed but cannot be edited. A buyer who picked the wrong size removes the line and rebuilds twelve fields.
• No continue shopping link, no shipping estimate, no lead time, no security note. Pick Up In Store appears above Checkout without context and only matters in Bryan.
• Shop Pay, PayPal and Google Pay are present. Good.
• On a phone the checkout button is 42px tall and about 940px down the page.

Content pages

1. 

   UX5High

   The restorations page asks customers to mail a credit card number

   The thirteen-step process is clear and worth keeping. The payment instruction asks for a check, money order, or a credit card number with expiry enclosed in the box. That is a card-data exposure and a trust problem in the same sentence. The turnaround is stated as four to six months, the phone link is unstyled blue, and the intake form below uses a different typeface.

   Fix. Sell a restoration deposit as a product, or send an invoice link after intake. Style the phone link and the form.

• The Felt Hat Guide is the best content on the site: quality tiers, a size chart, colours and head shapes with an anchor sidebar. It should live inside the product page and be linked from every collection.
• The About page says "over thirty years". The shop opened in 1983, so that is 43 years. It also contains empty H2 and H3 tags and no photos of the makers.
• The FAQ page runs about 230 words and answers nothing about shipping, lead time or returns.
• The contact page carries the address in body copy only, with no map and no hours.
• The News blog is in the sitemap with zero posts.
• The 404 page is fine: search box, link back to shopping.

Accessibility

Performance

In-browser measurements. Confirm against Search Console and PageSpeed Insights before quoting them.

• The server is fast. The cost is in the browser: 68 script tags and 250 to 290 requests per page from Bold, Boost, accessiBe, Hulk, Meta, GA4, shop.app, the pickup app and the theme itself.
• No image on any page tested uses lazy loading, and none carries width and height attributes. The hero is painted by script, so the largest contentful paint on a phone is likely well past 2.5 seconds.
• The Google Fonts request is malformed: an empty family followed by Old Standard TT twice and Lora twice.
• Console errors on every page: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'is_fixed'), Cannot read properties of null (reading 'parentNode'), the accessiBe config 404 and Shopify monorail fetch failures.