Reco Heart: most of the work wasn’t the shop

Nobody goes shopping for a post-surgery bra. That’s the thing I kept coming back to while I was building this one.

People arrive at Reco Heart with a date already in the diary. A mastectomy, a reconstruction, an implant removal, heart surgery. Often they’re a few days out, they’re sorting it around everything else going on that week, and they aren’t really shopping at all. They’re trying to work out what happens next.

Which is why most of this job turned out not to be the shop.

• Client: Reco Heart
• What they make: The Reco Bra, a front-fastening recovery bra and a Class 1 medical device
• Platform: WordPress and WooCommerce, with a bespoke theme replacing Divi
• What I did: Strategy, information architecture, design, the build, the migration, search and analytics
• Have a look: recoheart.com

Start with the operation, not the product

The old site had one product page and asked everybody to find their own way to it. But somebody facing a mastectomy and somebody having implants removed are in completely different situations, and they want different questions answered before they’ll trust you with anything.

So the site now has a route for each one. There’s a page for bras after breast cancer surgery, one for cosmetic and plastic surgery, one for lipofilling and fat transfer, and one for choosing a bra after implant removal.

Each of them opens the same way, with a section called “what the next few weeks may look like”, and then walks through it. Choose your size early. The bra goes on early. Swelling, dressings, rest. Everything gradually settles. Your follow-up decides what happens next.

What I like about these pages is how specific they’re allowed to be. The explant page has a heading that just says “the first look in the mirror can be hard, even when you are certain”, and then talks about it. It explains why fixed cups don’t work when your shape is going to keep changing. It isn’t selling at that point. It’s telling somebody what’s coming, which is the thing they actually came for.

A recovery hub arranged around where you are, not what we sell

Then there’s the recovery advice hub, which is the part I’d point at if somebody asked me what this site is really for.

It’s organised into the five stages people actually move through: just diagnosed, preparing for surgery, the first days after, weeks two to six, and longer-term healing. That last one exists because recovery doesn’t politely stop at six weeks, whatever the leaflet says. You go to the stage you’re in and read what’s relevant to this week, rather than wading through everything.

The guides underneath are properly written rather than padded out for Google. “How to sleep after breast surgery” covers setting up the bed, the bedside kit, getting in and out of bed, sleeping with drains in, and, best of all, a section headed “the 2am worries, answered plainly”, followed by one on when to ring somebody rather than waiting until morning. There’s another on what to pack in your hospital bag, one on how long you actually need to wear a post-surgery bra, and one on VAT relief.

Every guide ends with its sources, and the whole hub is free, with no sign-up and nothing gated. That last part matters more than it sounds. Somebody two days from an operation at half past one in the morning is not going to fill in a form to find out how to sleep.

The page that sends people somewhere else

My favourite thing on the whole site is a section on the advice hub headed “organisations, charities and specialists Nicole recommends”, where Nicole de Havilland, a lymphoedema practitioner of more than thirty years and the designer of the bra itself, points people at things Reco Heart doesn’t sell and makes nothing from.

There are surgical drain bags that hang from your shoulder so you don’t have to lift your arms, designed by a patient with the profits going to Prevent Breast Cancer. There’s a stand-to-pee device, because getting on and off a toilet after abdominal surgery is genuinely difficult and nobody warns you. There are soft wool pads from a supplier in Europe, priced in euros, with a note telling you to ask your surgical team before putting anything over a healing wound.

And there’s a whole block on lymphoedema, which the page introduces by saying it’s the part of recovery least likely to be explained to you properly. The national support charity, a therapist finder you can search by postcode, two mini guides, compression sleeves in patterns somebody might actually want to wear, and a specialist surgical practice for people who’ve been told surgery is an option. It finishes with Future Dreams, the breast cancer support centre in Kings Cross.

The introduction to all of it says: “We don’t sell any of these services or products. We’ve included them because recovery is about more than what you wear.”

Commercially that reads like madness. Every link sends somebody off the site. In practice it’s the most persuasive thing on there, because it’s the clearest possible signal that this business knows what it’s talking about and isn’t only interested in your card details. You cannot fake that page. You either know which charity to send somebody to or you don’t.

The practical things nobody tells you

Alongside the emotional side of recovery there’s a fair amount of admin, and the site now handles that properly too.

VAT relief has a page of its own. Products like this can be bought without VAT if you’re eligible, and an awful lot of people simply don’t know that, so it’s explained plainly and built into the checkout rather than hidden in a policy page. There’s a returns policy written to be read rather than to be defensible. There’s the instructions for use, in full, for both garments, which matters when you’re selling a medical device and somebody official may come asking.

And there’s finding your size, which is where the most interesting problem on the whole project was hiding.

The most important page on the site was a picture

The sizing chart was a JPEG, and a lovely one at that. Properly drawn, designed for print, exactly what you’d want to find in the box.

On a phone, though, a picture of a table behaves rather like a photograph of a spreadsheet. You can see it perfectly well, but you can’t do much with it. You end up pinching and dragging a wide flat image around a small screen with a tape measure in your other hand. And if your eyesight isn’t what it was, or you’re using a screen reader, it simply announces “image” and that’s your lot. Google can’t read a word inside a picture either, and neither can ChatGPT or Gemini, which is increasingly where people ask this sort of thing first, especially the slightly private questions they’d rather not ask a person.

So the one question the whole business rests on didn’t have a written answer anywhere on the site.

This isn’t anyone’s fault and it’s more common than you’d think. Somebody designs a beautiful chart for the packaging, it looks great, and putting it on the website seems like the obvious thing to do. I see the same with price lists, opening hours, delivery areas and menus all the time. If the most useful thing your business knows is sitting inside an image, it’s invisible to Google, unusable to plenty of your customers, and absent from the AI answers that now sit above the search results. I’ve written more about how businesses get quoted in those answers, and none of it works if your facts are pixels.

So the chart became actual data: bands in centimetres with inches alongside, the cup labels, and the thresholds where one cup ends and the next begins. It lives in one file now, and feeds a real HTML table, an interactive size finder you can type two measurements into, and structured data so search engines can read the method rather than guess at it. One source behind all three, so they can’t quietly start disagreeing, which they had already done between the printed insert, the website and the shop’s own dropdown.

There are also forty-six automated tests over the sizing that run every time I build the theme, and if a change would send somebody to the wrong size the build stops and refuses to produce a file. On most websites that would be well over the top, and I’d say so. For something worn over a fresh surgical wound, a wrong size isn’t really a returns problem.

The quiet things a rebuild turns up

Taking a shop apart properly brings every setting out into the daylight, and this one turned up a few of the expensive sort: the product showing £45 instead of £54 to some visitors because of a tax display setting, the Terms link at the checkout pointing at an unfinished draft page from 2020, and retired pages sitting without redirects, so links from older printed materials and other websites were landing on a “page not found”. About thirty redirects went in to catch those.

None of it is dramatic, which is rather the trouble. Nobody rings up to tell you about a missing page or a price that looks wrong. They just quietly go elsewhere, and the site carries on looking absolutely fine to everyone who already knows their way around it.

Meanwhile the shop stayed open the whole time. Years of orders and customers moved across, the old theme stayed installed but switched off, payments were changed over without breaking refunds on older orders, and the fulfilment company’s connection was checked and put back on the day it mattered. A launch day isn’t a finish line for a shop. It’s a day when nothing should go wrong and everyone gets on with their week.

What I’d take from this

If you sell something people buy at a difficult or complicated moment, and that’s a lot of businesses, the product page is the smallest part of the job. What earns the sale is everything around it: knowing which situation somebody is in, answering the question they’re actually sat there worrying about, and being straight with them even when the honest answer sends them somewhere else for a bit.

And it’s worth a quick look at whether the most useful thing on your own site is a picture. Your prices, your sizes, your opening hours, the specifications people ring up to ask about. If any of that only exists inside an image, it’s doing far less for you than you think.

Where it got to

Reco Heart now has a route for each operation, a recovery hub arranged around the stage somebody is at, a page that generously points them elsewhere, the practical admin dealt with properly, and a shop at the end of it for whenever they’re ready. Calm to read, easy to size, simple to buy from, and owned outright by the person who paid for it.

Have a look at recoheart.com.

If you sell online and you’ve had a nagging feeling your website is quietly working against you, it usually is, and it’s usually fixable. Have a read of how I go about online shops, or just send me the details and I’ll tell you honestly what I’d look at first.