Modelli Fabrics
Three thousand fabrics, and you can’t touch any of them.
Modelli Fabrics sell upholstery and curtain fabric direct to the public from Orston in Nottinghamshire. There is no shop floor and no showroom. The website is the whole business.
Finding one fabric in three thousand
Nobody browses three thousand fabrics. People arrive with a constraint: a colour that has to live with something they already own, a sofa that has to survive a dog, a pub banquette that has to meet fire regulations.
So the fabric finder filters on all of it at once. Colour, picked from a swatch rather than a word. Price. Weave and fabric type. Style. Intended use, from domestic upholstery through to marine grade. And fire retardancy, down to the specific standards a contract buyer has to satisfy.
That last one earns its place. Someone specifying fabric for a hotel cannot buy on looks alone, and the filters let them get to a compliant shortlist before they think about colour at all.
Selling something people want to touch
Fabric is a tactile purchase, and everything on the site is there to make up for the fact that nobody can put a hand on it.
Filter on everything at once
Colour by swatch, price, weave, style, intended use and fire rating, all applied together, so a shortlist takes a few clicks rather than a long scroll.
A sample of anything, free
Any fabric can be ordered as a free sample through the basket, like a product, because nobody commits to a roll of cloth without feeling it first.
Compliance you can filter by
Fire-retardancy standards are published as filters, so a specifier fitting out a hotel or a pub can shortlist on what they are allowed to buy before they think about colour.
What I did
I built this at webdna in 2019. The research, the design and the marketing strategy were other people’s work. What reached me was a flat design file, and everything between that file and a working site was mine: the content model underneath the fabric finder, and the whole of the front end.
A comp shows you one page at one width. It does not tell you what happens at 375 pixels, or when a fabric name runs to three lines, or how several dozen filter controls stay usable with a keyboard and announce their results to a screen reader, or how a catalogue this size loads quickly on a phone rather than only on a desk. That is the job.
Semantics and accessibility went in as the templates were written, not as an audit afterwards, because retrofitting them into a filter interface this dense is miserable and nobody ever budgets for it.
None of that is the sort of thing a client asks for by name, and it is usually the first thing dropped when a build runs tight. Seven years on, the site is still running on that code.
