Where it started
Königs Optik is a chain of 26 optics stores in Kaliningrad and the region, a two-time winner of the National Optical Award. A strong offline network with a website that told none of that: the site ran on 1C-Bitrix with an Aspro template and looked like a bare catalogue, while behind it stood doctors, a medical licence and a regional reputation.
The owner framed the task more honestly than most: the site is not there to sell. Lenses can be bought online; frames have to be tried on in a store. So the site has one job — make an impression and walk the person to the store.
The idea: focus through a lens
Optics sells sight. We took that literally and built the whole concept around focus: sharpness inside the lens, blur outside it. The metaphor works in statics, in motion and on any screen.
The entire visual language grew out of it: the Onest typeface, a deep burgundy as the primary colour, rounded pills, glass panels over dark photography. Calm premium — without the gold and flourishes that usually stand in for the word.
An interactive that explains the product in five seconds
A homepage like this is hard to sell in words, so we built a working demo and handed the client a link, not a picture.
The visitor picks a vision disorder — myopia, astigmatism, presbyopia, cataract or glaucoma — and adjusts its degree. The background changes to how a person with that disorder sees. The lens follows the cursor, or the finger on a phone: sharp inside, the chosen disorder outside.
Two things went in from day one. A disclaimer — "a visual simulation, not a diagnosis" — so nobody mistakes the toy for a medical verdict. And an honest note for cataract and glaucoma: optics does not correct them, an eye check detects them. That turns naturally into a free eye check call to action.
The demo is live: ko-vision-demo.vercel.app
Fixing what got in the way, while we were at it
In parallel with the concept we worked through the technical side on hourly support: found the cause of a section that kept going down, cleared server space, closed the critical bugs.
That work surfaced the project's main constraint. A new design cannot be grafted onto the Aspro template without breaking the site: touch the core and the site goes down. And the site cannot run on two templates at once — the "new homepage, old everything else" scheme simply does not exist. We said this on the first calls, before design started, and confirmed it with a code-level review.
An inconvenient conclusion, but an honest one: either a whole new template, or a beautiful homepage that lives in a drawer. We proposed the first and broke down what it consists of.
What is next
The homepage design and the demo are delivered, the technical package is closed. The redesign is now in progress: a new template on the existing Bitrix admin, five pages in the first wave — the catalogue and product page, about the company, stores with a map, and eye check booking. In parallel we run design support for the chain on a subscription.
What we take away
When the product is about perception, the best argument is letting people live that experience right on the page. The lens demo explains the value of optics faster than any list of benefits.
And second: sometimes the most useful thing for a client is the inconvenient technical truth, said before the work starts rather than after.
