Marque
India's premium pre-owned car market trades in volume. The promise of "premium" has been worn smooth — used for cars that have been wiped down rather than inspected.
Marque was set up as a thought experiment: what if a marketplace stopped trying to look bigger than it was, and instead made its smallness the proposition? What if every car came with a curator's signature, an engineer's report, and a register of why this one — and not the others — made it through?
The brief was internal but specific. Build a Shopify flagship for a category that doesn't yet exist in India: editorial pre-owned commerce. Eight cars on the floor at a time. A 142-check inspection rendered in full on every product page. A curator's letter. No countdown timers, no urgency theatre, no "certified pre-owned" badges that won't survive a careful question.
The visual thesis came first. Marque needed to feel like a gallery, not a lot — closer in register to Bring a Trailer's editorial discipline and Polestar's cinematic restraint than to anything in the Indian pre-owned space. We pulled the project tightly inside one typographic family, one italic accent used only in gold, and one structural rule: every page should read like a museum placard before it reads like a sales tool.
The product page was designed as a six-act narrative rather than a single template. A placard hero with mono-cap status indicators. A six-image walk-around grid styled like contact sheets. A curator's letter set in serif italic with an editorial pull-quote. A twelve-cell specification grid. A seven-card inspection report — each system rendered with status pill, findings, and the specific action taken. A sticky reservation bar that resolves the entire arc into a single, undramatic decision.
The collection page, sell-your-car form, stories index, and about pages were built to extend that register outward. Twenty-seven custom Shopify sections in total, threaded with a CSS variable system, IntersectionObserver-driven micro-interactions, and a native Contact form pipeline so seller submissions flow into Shopify Admin without third-party tooling.
Palette · nine tones
Paper on ink. Amber and gold are the only chromatic accents — amber for status and warmth, gold reserved for italic pull-quotes. Green and rust appear only inside inspection reports, where the colour itself carries information.
Type · one system
Geist sets every line of body and heading copy. Geist Mono handles placards, captions, and metadata. A single italic accent — Instrument Serif, set in gold — is permitted for pull-quotes and brand moments only. The constraint is the system.
Build
Shopify Liquid, hand-written. Skeleton theme taken apart and rebuilt around the editorial thesis. Twenty-seven custom sections, eight page templates, custom block schemas for the inspection report, walk-around grid, and stack rails. IntersectionObserver controls the sticky reservation bar and entrance animations. Native Shopify Contact form pipeline routes seller submissions directly into Admin. Custom CSS variable system for palette, type, and rhythm.
An argument for restraint in a category designed around urgency.