Yama: Sustainable Outdoor Brand and E-commerce Platform

We were responsible for brand strategy, visual identity and digital platform, designed as one system.

The online store is built on Nonspace Storefront using Shopify and Sanity, and includes a digital product passport, a structured take-back programme and a repair service integrated directly into the solution.

Yama operates at the intersection of outdoor performance and urban lifestyle. Credibility on both fronts is essential, and our first task was to create an identity that moves between worlds without fully belonging to either.

Second, we needed to translate circular ambition into something operational. Yama's sustainability commitments are promises that have to work on the platform: structurally, not just rhetorically. That meant building infrastructure beyond a standard e-commerce setup: a take-back programme, a repair service, and a system to track each garment throughout its full lifecycle.

There was also a more immediate conversion challenge. Customers would be buying premium outdoor garments without being able to touch or try them on. The platform needed to communicate quality, durability, and purpose clearly enough to earn that trust.

The platform was designed to feel more considered than a typical online store. Unhurried, intentional, with room to breathe.

The shop is restrained by design: eight products, clearly categorised, with colour filtering that makes the collection feel curated rather than incomplete. Nothing is trying to sell you more than you need.

The Explore section is where the brand's philosophy takes shape. Split into Stories and Guides, it resists the pull of the content feed. Stories like City to Trail and Seasonless don't describe products, they describe a way of living. Guides like Care Basics and Layering for Changing Conditions speak to customers who want to understand what they own, not just own it. One of these guides sits embedded directly in the shop grid, a quiet reminder that how you care for something matters as much as the purchase itself.

The Digital Product Pass is perhaps the most quietly radical element on the platform. Every garment ships with a QR code, with no app and no account required, that opens a product-specific page with materials, care, origin and repair options. It does not expire. It follows the garment through every wash, repair and resale, making the product's history visible and its future more considered. In an industry where sustainability is often a label, this is a living record.

The take-back programme turns circular ambition into a concrete action. After 12 months, customers can return a garment and receive a discount on their next purchase. Each piece is assessed by partner FIKSE / Manufacture Oslo and given one of four new lives: resale, rework, redesign or archive. The rules are transparent and the partners are named. This is not a promise hidden in the footer. It is a page in the navigation, as accessible as the shop itself.

The repair service completes the picture. Customers can book a repair directly through the platform, guided by the same care philosophy that runs through every other touchpoint.

Together, these decisions add up to something rare: a store built around the full life of a garment, not just the moment of purchase.

Yama enters the market with what most brands take years to build: a clear identity, a considered digital experience and a circular infrastructure that is not only communicated, but actually works.

Customers can repair, return and recycle directly through the platform. The process is documented, the partners are real, and each garment carries its own history.

An example of how brand values and platform design can work as one.

3D & clothes: Manufacture Oslo,
Digital Product Passport: Repass.io,
Repair Service: FIKSE