Case study · Websites · Market-entry site
The same client, a second time. Lumiere is taking its outdoor-systems brand into the UAE with a new manufacturer and a new design language, and needed a site that reads as a serious Dubai operation to premium buyers and to the manufacturer it is courting. Five pages, built from an empty repository.
0 reused
Tokens, components, copy or assets carried over from the first site
5 pages
Home, systems, projects, about, contact
8 systems
The hot-climate range, at the manufacturer's published spec
2nd build
Second site we have shipped this client
The product
Lumiere supplies and installs Aluminante aluminium architectural systems across the UAE: bioclimatic pergolas, motorised guillotine glazing, ZIP sun screens, frameless glass. It measures the opening, engineers the system to it, and hands it over working. The site speaks to premium villa, hotel and restaurant buyers and to Aluminante itself, whom Lumiere is courting for distributor terms. Plaster white, off-black ink, hairline rules, zero corner radius, one oxide red: minimal editorial, engineered.
Product in action
Screenshots from lumiere-systems.com itself, in the brand's own Plaster & Oxide system (warm plaster, off-black ink, hairline rules, one oxide red). The installation photography inside them is Aluminante's, attributed on the site.
Moment 1 · Hero
The cinematic hero was cut mid-build. What shipped is a single dusk plate under a scrim, the two-tier wordmark, and the offer in one line.
Moment 2 · The range
Eight systems, one editorial row each: a photograph with a square white card lapped over it. Oxide appears only on the index numeral, so the accent stays under a tenth of the screen.
Moment 3 · The ask
A Server Action behind the form, wired to Resend, taking up to 12 photos or drawings inside 25 MB. Every page on the site ends on this one ask.
The problem
Lumiere already had a site from us: bilingual EN and RU, Albert Genau glazing, a warm Ink & Brass system built for the Russian market. Entering the UAE changed every input underneath it. Different manufacturer, different range, different climate argument. In Russia the enemy is winter; in the Gulf it is heat, glare, dust and insects. The first site keeps its market and moves to a .ru domain, and the .com starts again from an empty repository.
The credibility job is dual, and harder than the first time. Aluminante exhibited at Big5 Dubai in 2024 with no GCC dealer, office or named project, and Lumiere is bidding to be that presence. On the buyer side there are no local installations yet, so the gallery is the manufacturer's photography, labelled as such on the page. With no portfolio to lean on, presentation quality is the proof.
A second brand build for the same client: no tokens, no components, no copy and no assets crossed from the Russian site.
Two readers again, a different pair: premium Gulf buyers, and the manufacturer Lumiere is courting for distributor terms.
Zero UAE projects to show, so the design itself had to carry the credibility the portfolio could not.
What we shipped
Every item below is live on lumiere-systems.com.
Warm plaster ground, off-black ink that is never pure black, hairline borders instead of shadows, zero corner radius on every element, and one oxide red held under a tenth of any screen. Prata at a single weight, over Heebo. Built as CSS-first Tailwind 4 tokens so the system lives in one file.
The hot-climate slice of the Aluminante range, six on the home page and eight on /systems. Every figure is the manufacturer's own: ZIP screens rated to 80 km/h wind, glazing panels to 4.5 by 4.5 m, load stated as structural rather than carried over from a snow market.
React 19 Server Action wired to Resend, taking photos, plans and PDFs: up to 12 files inside a 25 MB budget. Inputs are hardened against header injection and SVG uploads are excluded. A WhatsApp CTA is built and stays hidden until the UAE number exists.
Lumiere supplies and installs Aluminante systems while courting the distributorship, so the site says exactly that, never "authorised distributor". Factory figures are labelled the manufacturer's. Shade is never described as cooling. The gallery is captioned as Aluminante's installations.
Stitch MCP generated layout variants section by section: ten sections chosen, each logged with the reason its winner won. The six system cards were generated with nano_banana_2 and swap-marked for replacement by real photography.
The first Lumiere site is bilingual; this one ships one locale on purpose, so no RTL debt lands in v1. Copy still lives in a dictionary rather than in components, so an Arabic locale later is a data change instead of a rewrite.
How we shipped it
The same delivery model as every IB Digital build: a principal engineer owning every decision, AI tooling doing the heavy implementation, every section checked against the brief before it lands. Next.js 16 and React 19 on the latest stable, Tailwind 4 with CSS-first tokens, framer-motion as the only motion library on the page.
Twenty commits, five pages, thirteen section components, on a brief locked before the first commit: a second build for a client whose trust was already settled. The cinematic scroll hero from the original plan was cut mid-build once a single photographic plate proved it carried the same weight, and the GSAP, Lenis and canvas-scrub plumbing came out with it.
01
A scroll-scrubbed hero was storyboarded, then descoped, then deleted, all inside the same build. Shipping the honest version of the page beat shipping the ambitious one late.
02
Only design-agnostic plumbing moved between the two Lumiere repositories: motion primitives, the copy-dictionary pattern, the enquiry server action. Zero tokens, zero components, zero copy, zero assets.
03
Manufacturer figures are stated as the manufacturer's, and the gallery is captioned as Aluminante's installations. Saying plainly what is borrowed is what makes borrowed credibility read premium instead of thin.
The outcome
Lumiere entered the UAE with five pages, eight systems at published spec, and an enquiry form that actually delivers, live on the domain it already owned. The repeat brief is the part that matters: the first site earned the second one.
Let’s talk
No slide deck, no discovery call fee, no ‘request a quote’ games. We’ll tell you whether it’s a fit in the first call — and point you somewhere useful if it isn’t.