Distinctive Supply is a global hospitality supplier — the company behind the Le Labo bottle on the sink and the Apotheke soap by the tub, working with hotels, boutique properties, Airbnbs, country clubs and gyms to source amenities in bulk. It's a relationship business, run by founder Fay Neuman on the strength of long personal partnerships and the ability to get high-end brands approved and shipped. What it wasn't was a website. The wholesale operation lived almost entirely offline, which meant the smaller buyer with a one-time order had nowhere to go, and the larger prospect had nothing to look at before picking up the phone. The new site had to serve both — sell a case of shampoo to a stranger and convince a hotel group to start a relationship, without either goa cannibalizing the other.
Small order or long partnership? The central design problem was that Distinctive Supply has two customers who want completely different things, and forcing them down the same funnel would have failed both. So we built the choice into the architecture and made it impossible to miss: *Become a client* for ongoing partnership, *Shop our website* for a quick order, presented side by side, high on the page, in the same visual weight. Everything downstream reinforces the split. Prospective clients get the concierge story — the free amenities consult, expedited brand approval, custom procurement, no multi-year contract — laid out as a sequence they can picture themselves moving through. Self-serve shoppers get category tiles, a brand wall, ready-to-ship products with case pricing, and a Quickview that doesn't make them think.
The logo stayed; everything around it changed. We built the visual language up into something that actually matches the caliber of the products on the shelf: warm neutrals, generous space, editorial typography, and photography that treats a bottle of conditioner the way a hotel treats a guest. The catalog is full of brands like Byredo and Le Labo, and the old presentation gave a buyer no reason to believe Distinctive Supply belonged in that company. Now it looks like the supplier those brands would choose. We also gave Fay's story real estate on the site, because in a relationship business, trust is the product and the website is the first handshake.
Distinctive Supply came in with a real budget and a real ceiling, which is a good place to start if everybody's honest about it. Rather than quote a wish list and let it get cut down to something incoherent, Motif worked through the priorities with them directly: what the site had to do to earn its keep in year one, what would move revenue, and what was genuinely a phase two. Wholesale portals, deeper personalization, and the more elaborate merchandising ideas were parked, so the budget went into the pages that convert. The result is a site that feels expensive with everything they need and want right now.
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