The Magical Underland
The Magical Underland is a family-founded consumer products startup in Quebec City with a genuinely new invention: the world’s first patent-pending Christmas tree that children and pets can crawl inside. The product is remarkable. The website could not tell anyone why. Cluttered copy, mixed shipping messages, and a confusing checkout were burying a premium invention. Shoppers could not even tell whether they were buying or joining a waitlist. DAP built the brand, wrote every word, and developed the new website, and the first edition of 400 units sold out in three weeks.
The Magical Underland is a direct-to-consumer brand, founded by inventor Ana Maria Dinu, a Romanian-born Canadian mother of two, and built on Shopify. Its flagship product, the Magical Underland Christmas Tree Tent, is a patent-pending invention that combines a fully decorated six-foot Christmas tree with a glowing play space children and pets can crawl inside. It comes in a kids version and a pet version. The product has been recognized across the toy industry at the Chicago Toy and Game Fair, in the Women in Toys member spotlight, and by People of Play.
How We Helped The Magical Underland
Project Summary
The Magical Underland invented something no one had seen before, and almost no one could tell. The one detail that stops a parent, that a child can crawl inside the tree, was lost in dense copy, and a premium invention was selling on a page that never looked or felt premium. A freelancer had spent two months rebuilding it with nothing to show.
DAP started with the brand, because the product had a powerful story and nothing online was telling it right. We built the positioning, the messaging, and a complete visual system, then designed four full homepage concepts so the founder could pick the direction that best matched her vision for the brand.
We built the homepage around the one moment that makes the product unforgettable, rebuilt both product pages to sell, and delivered the supporting pages that carry the rest of the store.
The Challenge
INVENTION Invisible A one-of-a-kind product that looked ordinary online
The Magical Underland created a new product category, and it deserved a site that showed it off. The original website looked like an ordinary seasonal decoration, explained the product in long blocks of text rather than showing it, and let the one detail that makes a parent stop scrolling, that a child can crawl inside the tree, get lost in the middle of the page. For a premium $449 product, the experience needed to feel premium, and that’s where Digital Authority Partners came in.
BROKEN BUYING EXPERIENCE Shoppers could not tell if they could actually buy
A shopper with $449 in hand kept running into reasons to second-guess the purchase. Add to cart sat next to Email me when available, so buying looked like joining a waitlist. Free worldwide shipping in the header met a $600 minimum in the footer. The urgency timer read zero. Friction like this does not just annoy shoppers, it quietly costs the sale, and most stores never see it.
NO BRAND SYSTEM Great product, no system to keep it consistent
A product this distinctive deserved a brand system to match, and one had never been built. There was no brand guide, no color palette, no typography, no art direction, and the logo dated to a DIY app years earlier. Product facts even drifted between the homepage and the product page, down to how many branch tips the tree had. Without a foundation, every new page would pull further from the last.
A DEADLINE THAT COULD NOT MOVE Retail conversations were live and the site was not ready
Press, retailers, and partners were all interested in the product, and the holiday clock was already running. Two months with a freelance developer had left the founder without a site she could launch, so every bit of interest she earned arrived at a store that could not close the sale.
How we Helped The Magical Underland
Brand Foundation and Messaging Strategy
The startup had a remarkable product and no brand infrastructure. Before any design work, we built the foundation the site would stand on.
- Built the brand and messaging strategy from scratch, covering positioning, audience, and voice
- Found the one line that sells the whole product, the first Christmas tree families can go inside, and made it the organizing idea for every page.
- Designed a complete visual system: named color palette with hex values, type pairing, spacing, components, and motion rules
- Wrote the buyer profile around the real decision maker, a mother curating her family's holiday, and shaped every page around how she actually buys
- Audited the full asset library and built a photography shot list to fill the gaps
Four Design Concepts and a Full Site Build
We built four complete homepage concepts and put them all in front of the founder, so she could choose the direction with her eyes instead of her imagination.
- Delivered four distinct directions, from premium and cinematic to bright and gift-forward, each published live so she could click through them on her own phone and laptop
- Built the approved concept into a full site: homepage, kids product page, pet product page,
- Designed the homepage around one memorable moment, a scroll-driven sequence that carries the visitor from outside the tree to inside the glowing interior
- Wrote the brand copy on the site, from the hero headline to the product specifications to all 16 FAQ answers
Product Pages Built to Sell
The product pages are where eCommerce websites convert, so we rebuilt from scratch, from a single clear buy box to the trust signals a premium purchase requires to the order of the story on the page.
- The product pages are where buyers decide, so we rebuilt them on proven ecommerce structure instead of decoration.
- Rebuilt the buy box around a single clear action, replacing the mixed buy-and-waitlist signals that were costing sales
- Added the trust layer a premium purchase requires: safety certifications, patent-pending status, dimensions, estimated ship date, and an honest limited-edition count
- Designed each page to build the case for why a parent should buy the tree step by step, leading with the detail that hooks them, then benefits, what is included, full specifications, a comparison table, the founder story, and the FAQ.
What we Achieved
The entire first edition, 400 units at $449, sold out within three weeks of the new site going live. A product that had struggled to explain itself online cleared its full inventory.
The store converted from the first week, not after a slow buildup. Three weeks after launch the company had sold its full first production run and shifted its focus to the next edition.
The DAP team built the brand, designed and developed all pages. The founder never had to juggle vendors or stitch separate pieces together.
The first edition sold out at full price, with no markdown or launch sale to push it out the door. A premium product finally had a store that sold it like one.
The company went from no brand guide at all to a documented system with a named palette, a type pairing, components, and motion rules, so every page built from here stays consistent.
"The Digital Authority Partners team designed and built our entire ecommerce website from scratch, and I could not be happier. As an early-stage startup with a brand-new product, I needed a site that felt premium and actually told our story, and they delivered exactly that. They gave us several design directions to choose from, wrote all of the copy, and built beautiful, conversion-focused product pages, then built the website on Shopify. The whole team was professional, incredibly fast, and patient through every round of feedback. If you need a high-converting ecommerce or Shopify website that truly looks and feels like your brand, I recommend DAP without hesitation. They went above and beyond for us."
