The Challenge
MINE was a B2C high-ticket fashion platform that needed a standout feature to drive user acquisition and conversions. The core differentiator was an AI-powered style-discovery engine that would recommend personalized fashion items based on user preferences. The challenge was twofold: building a performant frontend that could handle the AI engine's response times, and creating a design system that could scale across the growing product.
My Role
As Senior Frontend Engineer, I was responsible for:
- Building the frontend application with React and TypeScript
- Integrating the AI style-discovery engine with optimized UX
- Creating a scalable design system with Storybook
- Optimizing performance for SEO and organic traffic growth
- Implementing responsive images, lazy loading, and component architecture
Technical Approach
AI Integration & Perceived Performance
The AI API had slower-than-expected response times, which threatened the user experience. I implemented aggressive frontend optimizations to mitigate the latency:
- Preloading strategies - Anticipated user actions and prefetched AI results
- Skeleton loading states - Maintained engagement during processing
- Caching layer - Stored previous AI results to speed up repeat interactions
- Lazy loading - Deferred non-critical content to prioritize the AI experience
Design System
I built a scalable component library using React, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, and Storybook:
- Consistent UI components across the platform
- Interactive documentation for the development team
- Reusable patterns that accelerated feature development
SEO & Performance
Organic traffic was critical for the business model. I focused on:
- Technical SEO - Proper meta tags, structured data, semantic HTML
- Performance - Achieved 90+ Lighthouse scores across all pages
- Responsive images - Automatic format selection and lazy loading
- Component refactoring - Reduced homepage load time by 20%
Key Learnings
- Perceived performance matters as much as actual performance - Skeleton states and preloading made the AI feel instant
- Design systems accelerate development - The upfront investment in Storybook paid off quickly
- SEO is a growth engine - 22% weekly organic traffic increase compounded significantly
Results
- 10,000 user signups in the first month
- ~10% conversion rate - approximately 990 orders
- 22% increase in weekly organic traffic
- 90+ Lighthouse score across all pages
- 20% reduction in homepage load time