Work / PUR Nail Spa

Their own work was the best thing about the salon, and the website hid it.

PUR has a 5.0 rating across 383 Google reviews, a gallery of hand-painted nail art with their logo on every photo, and a 150-minute head spa nobody else on the Monon offers. The current site opens with a policy popup, keeps every price inside a click-to-open window, leads with stock photos, and never mentions the rating. The concept reverses all four.

Industry: Nail spa, Carmel
Type: Unsolicited homepage concept, one page
My role: Research, design, copy, build
Preview: Open the concept site

PUR Nail Spa concept at desktop width: headline Nails you'll want to photograph, two photos of the salon's nail art, a strip of four more, then the full price list with a booking rail beside it. — The first two screens at desktop width.

What I found

I went through the live site on a laptop and a phone the way a new client would. A three-slide popup covers the page on arrival. Prices exist, but only inside modals you have to open one category at a time. The big homepage photos are stock; the salon's real work sits lower down in a gallery. The 5.0 Google rating appears nowhere. Hours are findable but not on the first screen.

Goal. Let someone decide to book within the first screen: see the work, see a price, see the hours, press one button that goes to the salon's existing booking system.

Rule I set myself. Nothing invented. Every price is from their current menu, every photo is theirs, every review is a real Google review with the client's first name. Anything I couldn't verify is marked in brackets on the page instead of guessed.

First screen of the PUR concept on desktop: headline, two booking buttons, the 5.0 rating line, and two photos of the salon's nail art. — First screen. A price, the rating and the hours are all readable before anyone scrolls.

PUR concept on a phone: headline, buttons, rating line, then the salon's photos in a swipeable strip. — On a phone the photos become a swipe strip and a Book button stays fixed to the bottom of the screen.

Design decisions

Three directions before one. I built three working versions first: one led by their photos, one that made the price list the whole first screen, one dark evening-spa treatment around the head spa. The photo-led direction won because it's the one a competitor can't copy; the price-first version's booking rail was folded into it.

Cool off-white, not cream. Their nail art is bright: tangerine, cobalt, shell white. A warm beige page would fight it. A cool off-white with charcoal type lets the photos carry the color.

A cobalt accent taken from their own work. The blue in the buttons is the blue of the evil-eye and petal designs in their gallery. It's the only color on the page that isn't in a photo.

Fraunces and Manrope. A soft, slightly playful serif for headlines, a quiet sans for everything else. Nail art is joyful; the type should be too, without turning into a template.

The rating goes above the fold. 5.0 across 383 reviews is the most persuasive fact the salon has. It sits under the buttons with a small gold star, then anchors a reviews section with three real quotes.

A booking rail that never leaves. Hours, a Book button and the phone number stay pinned beside the price list on desktop, so nobody reads prices and then has to scroll to act on them.

A working form for the things booking software can't do. Groups, gift cards and questions get a real form with validation and a sent state, running on the host's form service. One test submission confirmed it end to end.

What a real client gets

This page, with the brackets filled in: a confirmed basic-pedicure price, the card fee if there is one, a salon email instead of a personal Gmail, and Google reviews pulled in automatically so they stay current. Hosting and the inquiry form are included in the monthly fee.