Hook and Eye Company — Project Understanding Brief

Before we commit to design, here is what I heard from you on the 17th, written back so you can correct anything I misread. Please flag anything that is off — easier to fix now than after we build against it.

The shape of the project

We are rebuilding the Hook and Eye website, moving off Wix, and doing it in a way where you keep the keys. You were explicit about this: you'd rather learn to maintain it yourself than have it built for you and be locked out of changes down the road. That choice shapes everything else about how I approach this.

The working cadence is the "Option C" we landed on — a three-week pilot, one session a week on Fridays at 11:00, where I do some of the building and we work through the rest together. The first milestone is a base site posted as soon as we can get it up so you have something real to iterate on over the next two and a half weeks before your schedule tightens. The target for a "finished" version — with the quotes you reserved for the word — is early July. Nothing is ever truly finished in your work or mine, and the site will keep moving after that.

Two clienteles, two paths through the site

You named this clearly and it is the single most important framing for every design decision that follows:

• Commercial partners — companies like Lego, Texas Rose, and the film / fabrication work that keeps the studio on the map. These folks do not find you through the website. They text Samantha, they call Samantha, they email directly. The website's job for this audience is to set expectation: when they land on it, they should think, "I don't know exactly what they do, but they know how to do it really well." They come via referral and warm contact; the site's job is to confirm what they already suspect.
• Normies (your word — it fits) — the college student with a first-wedding hem, the walk-in with an alteration, the person Googling "alterations Austin." This audience finds you through Google and Google Business first, and then the website. The website's job here is different: help them self-qualify, show them the process, give them a way to schedule, and screen out the ones whose expectations do not match the work.

Commercial work bypasses the site; normies come through it. The design should serve both without collapsing into one.

What's broken about the current Wix setup

You named the pain points in order of how much they hurt:

• The contact form gets spam-flagged in both directions — inbound gets buried in your spam folder, and your replies to normies look sus enough to bounce or go to their spam. Real customer contacts get lost inside an hour of inbox scrubbing.
• The Wix email system is not real email in any practical sense. It does not integrate with Google Workspace, which you do love and are expanding your use of.
• The Wix "business phone number" turned out not to be a real phone number — you can't port it. That pattern of "Wix-flavored" services that look like the real thing but are not has eroded trust in the platform.
• Subscription fatigue. Your quote was essentially: "I just want to host. Give me the analytics. I don't want to pay for the rest of it." You are not against paying for things that earn it; you are against paying for bundled features you don't use.
• Limited editorial control. You love graphic design, and Wix lets you do less than you want.
• The "Wix look." Even the v2 draft someone started for you still reads as a Wix template. That is the pattern you most want to break — the site should look unmistakably like your shop, not like a theme.

What stays

• Google Workspace. You are happy with it and expanding use (Drive, Sheets). The new site will connect to it — email, calendar, forms, whatever makes sense — rather than re-create the parts you already have.
• The domain. You already own it and renewed recently. We will transfer it off Wix (there is an intermediate-registrar step because Cloudflare does not accept direct transfers from Wix) and onto Cloudflare, likely via Porkbun as the middle hop. I'll give you the mechanics as a standalone options doc so you can read it without needing me in the room.

The pages you want

From the 17th and from what I could see in the v2 draft you started:

• Home — hero + elevator pitch; carousel portfolio of your two or three strongest recent projects; social-proof logo strip (Lego, Texas Rose, others — we'll be careful about badge permissions).
• Who We Are — team page, but unified, not individual grad-school bios. When someone hires you they are hiring the shop, not a lineup of people. This was one of your clearest corrections on the v2.
• Services — what you actually do, at a register that lets a commercial buyer and a normie both feel seen.
• Where You've Seen Our Work — portfolio page with more depth than the carousel; a home for the kind of work that is hard to place on any other tab.
• Process — the "how we work with you" page. You told me you have been kicking this idea around for a while: walk a visitor through what it is like to work with Hook and Eye, because so few people commission custom work anymore and they do not know what to expect. You were right that this page is useful and fun — people like seeing how the sausage gets made when the sausage is this good.
• Contact — mailto button that opens the visitor's email app with the right address pre-filled; an embedded Calendly so folks can book an alteration drop-off without calling (you mentioned millennials would rather book than phone, and you are right). Eventually: a more personalized contact form with attachment upload for inspiration photos and references.

Features for later, not session 01

You flagged these as exciting but not first-post urgent:

• Wedding silhouette selector — interactive "point to the dress shape you are imagining" tool. Callie is the expert here; this page should wait until we can include her properly. It's a natural phase-two or phase-three feature.
• Inspiration-photo upload portal — so clients can send references without starting a twenty-five-email thread. Goes hand in hand with the privacy policy language we'll write.
• Backend integrations — scheduler auto-populating Google Calendar; payment receipts flowing to a spreadsheet; text notification when someone books. All possible, none urgent for session 01.

Design direction — where we landed after the recorder turned off

After the transcript ended, you raised something I want to put back on the table because it is a real option and it is a good one: graphic-novel / comic framing as a visual language for the site. "We build cool shit" over a leather jacket with a tiger on the back. Theater-kid cultural register. Attitude paired with professionalism.

I think this has legs. It does three things at once: it differentiates from a Wix template (your biggest aesthetic worry), it differentiates from the growing set of recognizably AI-built sites (your second worry — which is fair, skills are getting distributed), and it pairs the attitude you actually have with the professionalism that commercial buyers need to see. The jacket-with-tiger becomes a hero moment, not the whole site — the rest of the surface carries the professionalism.

I am going to bring this to session 01 as one of four design directions, not a commitment. The options slate (separate deliverable) lays out all four so you can react.

Legal — yes, but not the blocker

You named privacy policy and terms. The big-ticket item for Hook and Eye specifically is the measurement-and-photo language: we take measurements, we sometimes photograph work in progress, we do not sell any of that, and we delete it when the job is done. That is a straightforward privacy-policy paragraph and it will live both in the full policy and, in plainer language, somewhere on the Process page where it will actually be read.

Allergy information (which you ask for in alterations work) is sensitive but not protected health information for your industry, so we have flexibility. The employee handbook you mentioned is a useful reference — overlap is likely. When you are ready to have a lawyer review the finished policies, we will hand them a clean, reasoned draft rather than a template.

What I'm bringing to session 01

Five documents and one live mock-up page:

1. This brief — so you can correct me before the rest commits.
2. Options slate — four design directions (including the graphic-novel direction) with a one-page storyboard each. Your decision to make in the meeting.
3. Sitemap — page-by-page IA with rationale, including where the features-for-later live when they arrive.
4. Domain-transfer path — Wix → intermediate registrar → Cloudflare, with the gotchas and a rollback note, so nothing surprises us when we start moving DNS.
5. Questions back to you — a short list of things I need you to ratify or answer before I can move further.
6. HTML mock-up — a single self-contained page rendering the direction I recommend, so you can see it, not just read about it. Open it in any browser.

What I'd love you to correct

Before Friday at 11:00, if anything above is off — especially the two-clientele framing, the pages list, or the "finished-in-quotes" interpretation — please flag it. I would rather rebuild the brief than build the wrong thing around a wrong brief.

If it all reads right, no reply is needed — we'll work from it.