Zamel’s has been selling jewellery in Australia for more than 66 years, across 39 stores. In 2020, weeks after we brought sister brand Mazzucchelli’s online, we built Zamel’s its own Shopify storefront. We have redesigned it once, upgraded it to Shopify Plus, and kept adding to it ever since.
Zamel’s sits alongside Mazzucchelli’s within The Jewellery Group, where The Animals were full-service Agency of Record. Where Mazzucchelli’s trades on fine jewellery and designer watch collections, Zamel’s is built on accessibility: a broad range at sharper price points, sold through 39 stores nationally to customers shopping for gifts, celebrations and everyday pieces rather than milestone purchases.
The brief
The Mazzucchelli’s build had proved the model. Lockdown had closed the stores, the group was sitting on stock with no way to move it, and the second brand needed the same treatment.
Zamel’s was the smaller job of the two, which sounds like the lesser brief and was not. Mazzucchelli’s had to convince customers to buy fine jewellery sight unseen. Zamel’s had to deliver range, speed and clarity at volume, across a catalogue built for browsing rather than deliberating. Same platform, different problem.
The approach
We built on Shopify, designing the storefront around how Zamel’s customers actually shop: category-led, price-aware, and often buying for someone else. Development ran with Net Ninjas and Decode, the same partnership behind the Mazzucchelli’s build, which meant the second store inherited everything the first one had taught us.
What followed was less a project than a working relationship with a platform in the middle of it. We redesigned the store in 2022 as the brand evolved. In 2024 we moved it to Shopify Plus, once catalogue size, traffic and promotional complexity had outgrown what standard Shopify was built to carry. Along the way we designed the features the business asked for as it needed them, including a careers section and a loyalty program.
The results
The store has traded continuously since 2020 and is now in its third generation of design. Shopify Plus gave the business headroom for the heavily promotional retail calendar Zamel’s works to, with sales, bonus offers and birthday campaigns running across a catalogue of several thousand products.
The more telling result is the length of the engagement. Five years, two redesigns, a platform upgrade and a steady stream of new features is not what happens when a build is handed over and forgotten.
Why this project matters to us
Most agency case studies end at launch. This one is interesting because of what came after.
Shipping a store in a crisis is one kind of skill. Keeping it commercially useful for five years, through a redesign, a replatform and whatever the business decided it needed next, is a different one, and it is the part most clients actually need. We are grateful to the team at Net Ninjas and Decode for the development craft underneath it.
If you are running a retail business on Shopify and starting to feel the ceiling, that is usually a sign the platform conversation is due. We would love to talk.
