Dirty Billy's Hats - Ariel Parzynski Portfolio

A Digital Home for Historical Headwear

client: Dirty Billy's Hats, a Gettysburg-based haberdashery
role: Project Manager, UX, UI, Design
timeline: 9 months

Background

In 2020, as the pandemic forced small businesses to rethink how they reached customers, Dirty Billy’s Hats — a beloved Gettysburg haberdashery known for historically accurate headwear — had no meaningful digital presence. Their existing site directed 100% of purchase inquiries to a phone number, a poorly designed online form, and a Facebook page, with no e-commerce capability and no easy way for the owners to update prices, add products, or run promotions. Building a real online home had become urgent.

Discovery

I spent a day at the store to understand their world firsthand. What I found were two distinct users with fundamentally different needs — and a design challenge I didn’t expect.

Fran, who managed the modern hat inventory, wanted a straightforward e-commerce experience: easy browsing, simple checkout, and the ability to run promotions without needing a developer.

Bill, the craftsman behind the historical pieces, had a more nuanced goal. He wasn’t looking to make historical hats easy to buy online — he wanted to ensure every customer who purchased one understood the historical accuracy behind it. For Bill, a hat worn inauthentically was a problem worth preventing. That meant the design needed two deliberately different flows: a streamlined purchase path for modern hats, and a consultation-first path for historical pieces that routed inquiries through a direct conversation with Bill.

Definition

The project’s objectives were to:

Replace a phone-and-Facebook-only presence with a fully functional e-commerce platform
Streamline modern hat browsing and purchasing across all devices
Create an education-first path for historical headwear that preserved Bill’s consultative sales process
Give Fran and Bill the ability to independently manage inventory, pricing, and promotions
Integrate with their existing POS system for a seamless experience across devices

Design

After evaluating development partners, I presented my recommendation to the owners and selected NetzOptimize based on budget fit and long-term maintenance suitability. Throughout the engagement I served as the bridge between client and vendor — facilitating decisions, translating business needs into design requirements, and keeping both sides aligned through Basecamp and five recorded Zoom feedback sessions.

I designed 15 page types across desktop, mobile, and tablet — 45 individual layouts in total — including a scalable product page template built to accommodate hundreds of SKUs across both modern and historical inventory. These page types included:

A homepage and primary navigation structure
Hub pages for modern and historical hat categories
A scalable product page template with related product suggestions and a custom order request path
A dedicated consultation flow for historical pieces
Category pages enabling quick inventory browsing

After completing wireframes I developed a series of moodboards for the owners to choose from. They selected a rustic, handcrafted aesthetic that paid homage to the historical nature of the hats and the character of their Gettysburg storefront. I then built out the full design system and hi-fidelity prototypes, and refreshed the Dirty Billy’s logo to align with the new visual direction.

Outcomes

The project was completed to a fully realized hi-fi prototype stage, with a production-ready design system, logo refresh, and developer-ready handoff coordinated across a remote development team. 15 page types were designed across 3 breakpoints — including a scalable product template built to grow with the inventory — replacing a site that had previously offered customers no path to purchase beyond a phone call or Facebook message.

Takeaways

This project taught me two lessons I carry into every engagement:

1. Content dependencies need to be treated as hard project milestones from day one — not assumptions. Populating a large inventory across hundreds of product pages is a significant operational lift that needs to be scoped, scheduled, and owned explicitly.

2. Stakeholder enthusiasm during design isn’t always a reliable signal of readiness. Like the classic ‘New Coke’ problem, people often respond positively to something in the abstract without fully internalizing what it means in practice. I now build operational readiness conversations into every project before handoff.