Smooth Shafts sells hand-picked secondhand golf clubs out of North Canterbury. Every club is individually selected, cleaned, and buffed if necessary before it's listed. Most orders go out with a couple of tees or golf balls thrown in — the kind of detail that directed the vision for the site before David and Claire had even told me what they were building.
The direction was clear from the start: premium golf clubs sold by good people, with a level of care and trust that no other secondhand golf store in New Zealand had. That became the entire brief. Minimal, clean, trustworthy, product-focused.
When someone's deciding to spend $1,000 on irons they can't even hold, the design of the website is the only thing standing between that sale and them closing the tab.
BEFORE / AFTER
A free Shopify theme doesn't give you much to work with. Making something feel premium with zero budget is mostly an editing problem — knowing what to remove and what to lean into.
The old site was doing too much. Dark theme, text sitting over a grass photo, placeholder collection tiles still live in the build. We stripped it back. White background. Clean navigation. Custom Liquid blocks that took it just far enough from a standard Spectra build that the trust signal was there before anyone read a word.
The site leads with product. A Callaway Paradym Ai Smoke on a white background, bleeding off the right edge of the frame. That club sits in an interesting position — premium enough to feel like a find, popular enough that any golfer recognises it immediately. It's the kind of club you wouldn't expect to stumble across secondhand. When that's the first thing someone sees, the feeling lands before anything is said: I might have just found something here.
David photographs every club himself. Every angle, every mark, every sign of wear documented and named honestly. We wrote around that photography — the guarantee on every product page reads like a person talking, not a policy document:
"Every club we sell is individually inspected, cleaned, and tested before it's listed. All photos show the exact club you'll receive, and we intentionally photograph every mark, scratch, and sign of wear so there are no surprises when it arrives."
No stock photos. No hidden damage. No vague condition descriptions. The honesty isn't a brand choice. It's a conversion mechanic. When a buyer can see every scratch before they spend $300, the hesitation disappears.
PRODUCT PHOTOGRAPHY
The creative strategy was UGC-style video — human voiceover, product close-ups, the sound of a clean strike. Quick cuts that held retention without feeling like an ad. The brief was to stop a golfer mid-scroll and make them feel like they'd found something they didn't know existed.
4.4% CTR on cold traffic. Industry benchmark sits between 0.9–1.2%.