Refined and Editorial Squarespace Website for a Brass Instrument Maker
Rebuilding a legacy brand's digital presence on Squarespace 7.1
S.E. Shires Co. is a Massachusetts-based maker of high-end brass musical instruments — trombones, trumpets, euphoniums, and accessories — with a reputation built on uncompromising craftsmanship and deep ties to the professional music community. The company came to us with a very specific situation: an existing Squarespace 7.0 website that had reached its ceiling. Migrating to 7.1 required a full rebuild, and they wanted to use that moment as an opportunity to refresh the brand and unlock capabilities the old platform simply couldn't support.
The site wasn't published by the time this case was written — this branding and web design were proposed for S.E. Shires; at the time of the publication, the team was still fine-tuning the details.
Palette and Visual Identity
The S.E. Shires brand occupies an interesting visual niche: it needs to feel premium and serious without the coldness of a tech company, and warm and craft-oriented without the rusticity of a workshop. The solution is an editorial palette anchored in muted warm neutrals — creamy off-whites, warm grays, deep charcoal — punctuated by the natural gold and silver tones of the instruments themselves. The photography does a lot of the heavy lifting here: close-up detail shots of valves, bells, and slides turn the product into abstract texture, while artist portraits and performance imagery bring in the human side of the brand.
Typography is clean and confident, pairing a strong serif with a restrained sans-serif — a combination that signals heritage and precision without feeling old-fashioned.
Site Structure
The navigation reflects the breadth of the S.E. Shires catalog. Instrument categories — Trombones, Trumpets, Euphoniums, Accessories — each get their own dedicated section, with further breakdown by instrument type within each category (alto, tenor, bass, piccolo, artist models, and so on). This depth of content is one of the core challenges of the project: how do you present dozens of instrument variants without turning the site into a spec sheet?
The answer is a modular, category-first layout where each instrument type gets a featured introduction — a short description, a striking photograph, a defining visual divider — before the product grid appears. The result reads more like an editorial catalog than a standard e-commerce listing page, which is exactly the right register for an instrument at this price point.
Beyond the catalog, the site includes pages for Artists, About, Fittings, and Shop — the full ecosystem of a brand that sells not just instruments but a relationship with its community of musicians.
The Homepage
The homepage is designed to orient and inspire rather than sell directly. The hero section leads with a brand statement — "Handcrafted by the Finest" — set against close-up product photography. Below it, a pair of featured category tiles pulls visitors toward the two flagship instrument lines. A scrolling product carousel ("Backed by Excellence") introduces the breadth of the range without overwhelming, and artist spotlights put names and faces to the instruments — a crucial trust signal for professional musicians evaluating a significant purchase.
The homepage also surfaces the workshop and fitting experience, reminding visitors that S.E. Shires isn't just a catalog: it's a relationship between maker and player.
Navigating a Deep Catalog
One of the more nuanced decisions on this project was how to handle the depth of the product catalog on Squarespace, a platform not originally built for large-scale e-commerce. The category pages use a combination of visual section breaks, alternating layouts, and bold typographic headers to break the catalog into scannable chunks — small bore trombones here, tenor trombones there, artist models at the bottom — so that a working musician looking for something specific can find it quickly, while a new visitor can browse without feeling lost.
The Outcome
S.E. Shires Co. now has a Squarespace 7.1 foundation that matches the quality of what they build. The rebuild preserves everything that worked about the original site — the editorial tone, the deep catalog, the artist community — while opening the door to the expanded capabilities and flexibility that 7.1 makes possible.
Scroll through the home page:
