Arabic Notebook

The challenge

Arabic Notebook sells one thing, in two covers, into the UK: an A4 notebook ruled with fifteen large lines instead of the usual twenty-something, because Arabic script does not fit ordinary paper. Letters drop below the baseline, dots stack above it, and joining strokes need room to run — on standard ruling the word wins and the line loses. That is a genuinely good product idea and a genuinely hard store to build, because a two-product catalogue has none of the things a storefront normally leans on. There are no collections to browse for their own sake, no filtering worth the name, no discovery loop, and nothing to cross-sell. A visitor either understands why fifteen lines matter within about ten seconds or leaves, and search engines have almost no surface area to index — two product pages will not rank for anything. So the build had two jobs that a bigger catalogue would have solved by accident: make the constraint itself legible enough to sell on, and manufacture enough legitimate content for the store to be findable at all.

What we did

• Made the ruling the argument rather than a specification. 'Fifteen lines. Far more freedom.' runs the homepage, the product page opens on 'Why 15 large lines changes everything', and the line count sits in the announcement bar, the hero strapline and the first line of every product card — so the one thing that distinguishes this notebook is never more than a scroll away.
• Gave the reasoning its own page. 'Why 15 lines' explains the descenders, the stacked dots and the joining strokes in the buyer's terms, which is both the objection handler for a first-time visitor and the only page on the store with a real chance of ranking for how Arabic is written rather than for a product name.
• Turned the only real decision into a real comparison. Hardcover or softback is the sole choice a buyer makes here, so it gets a side-by-side table on the product page across cover, weight, portability, page count and binding, plus a Compare formats page behind it — rather than leaving the shopper to infer the difference from two product titles.
• Built the merchandising out of use cases instead of attributes, because attributes do not exist at this catalogue size: For students, Calligraphy practice, Everyday journalling and Madrasa notebooks each address a different reader with the same two products, and each is an addressable landing path.
• Published the specifications as a first-class section rather than a paragraph — A4 at 210 × 297 mm, 200 pages, 80 gsm, section-sewn or flexible binding — with a size and specification guide in both centimetres and inches, because a notebook bought online is bought on measurements the buyer cannot check by hand.
• Added the study-tools layer the catalogue could never generate on its own: a learning journal, free printables and an Arabic letter guide. This is where the store earns organic traffic — people search for how to form Arabic letters long before they search for a notebook to form them in.
• Built the one upsell the catalogue actually supports. 'Complete your study pair' offers hardcover and softback together at a set price, which is the only genuine basket-builder in a two-product store and beats a generic related-products rail.
• Opened the routes a single-product brand needs to sell beyond one buyer at a time — Gift sets, and a Bulk & school orders path with a direct line to support, since a madrasa or a language school ordering thirty notebooks is not going to use the normal cart flow.
• Wired discovery for a catalogue too small to browse: predictive search with a curated intent map, so 'hard', 'soft', 'line', 'gift' or 'school' resolve to the right page instead of returning two products and nothing else, alongside a wishlist and a persistent mobile bottom navigation bar.
• Stated the commercial promises where the decision is made rather than in a policy page — worldwide delivery, UK dispatch in two to four working days, 30-day returns on unused notebooks and secure checkout, all present on the product page.
• Shipped it as a bespoke, mobile-first Shopify theme in the brand's own palette, with the FAQ, care instructions and paper-quality detail on the page instead of behind a link.

The results

How we would approach yours

Every engagement starts the same way: a free audit of the store as it stands today — speed, technical SEO, checkout friction and paid efficiency — followed by a prioritised roadmap that puts effort against expected impact. You keep the findings whether or not we go further.

From there the work runs in weekly sprints against a live staging link, on fixed scope, with design, development and marketing in one team. That last part is why a conversion problem gets diagnosed once here rather than being passed between two agencies who each think it belongs to the other.