The next five weeks
Prepared for Amanda Suliman by ruko.studio, October 2026
Prepared for Amanda Suliman by ruko.studio, October 2026
Amanda, here is what we found in week one, where we are taking Rainbow & Spoon, and how the next five weeks run.
There are ten questions in here, numbered in pink. Most take a sentence. Answer them whenever suits, all in one email reply, by number.
What we found
One
We had this filed as a problem to work around. It is the opposite.
Nobody has ever found Rainbow & Spoon by accident. Every single person who has walked through that door made a decision to walk down the path to get there. That is not a weakness. It is the definition of a destination, and it is something almost no shop in Oxford can claim.
Your own customer said it better than we can.
You're like fairies at the bottom of the garden. From your answer to question nine
Independent Oxford called you "tucked away in a flower-filled courtyard" five days before we started. That post took 155 likes. Your own posts usually sit somewhere around twenty. One person describing you properly outperformed your entire year.
So the courtyard goes to the front of everything. Not apologised for. Led with.
Two
Your A-board, in chalk
Life is too short to wear boring clothes.
Your homepage
As unique as you.
You wrote the first one yourself. The second could sit on almost any fashion site in the country. There is more of this. Your Instagram captions are specific, funny and unmistakably yours, and almost none of that voice has made it onto the website.
We are not inventing a voice for Rainbow & Spoon. You already have one. We are moving it onto the things you own.
Three
June and Sam. Way India, bringing woodblock printing from the East to the Western market in the 1960s. Hand-painted silk sold through London. Design By Suliman on Maddox Street. Sundance in Cornwall. Oxford in 1982.
And then the name itself. Sam "Rainbow", from the rainbow spectrum he hand-painted onto silk. June "Spoon". We would be surprised if one customer in a hundred knows that, and it is the best thing on the page.
Here is the part that made us sit up. You are still selling hand-painted silk scarves today. Forty-four years on, the shop is still doing the thing it was named after. Nobody has ever said that out loud, anywhere. It becomes a named part of what you sell.
Question one
Is there anything left from those years? Photographs of June and Sam, old labels, swatches, press cuttings, a piece of Way India fabric, anything at all from Design By Suliman or Sundance.
Even a bad photograph of something in a box is useful. If there is nothing, that is a perfectly good answer too.
Four
You told us that yourself, and you also told us exactly how you would describe your price point: much more affordable than you think.
That sentence is currently doing nothing. It is one of the most useful things you said, because it is the thought standing between a person on the pavement and a person walking down your path. It goes on the website, in your words.
Where we are taking it
The hidden boutique in an Oxford courtyard, chosen piece by piece by one family of artists since 1982, where every visit is a personal styling session rather than a shopping trip.
Chosen, not stumbled upon. That is the idea underneath all of it, and it works twice over. The shop has to be chosen, because you cannot find it by accident. And everything inside it was chosen, by hand, by someone with forty years of looking behind her.
What carries it
A shop you have to choose to visit, and are rewarded for choosing.
Two generations of artists, choosing by hand. Colour and character, and nothing you will see on the high street.
Not a transaction. Somebody who knows what will suit you, and wraps it properly.
At the moment, everything Rainbow & Spoon is known for lives in you. Every review names you. We are not changing that and would not want to. Your eye is the product.
What we are doing is writing it down. Your taste, in language, on the website, on the swing tickets and in a set of guidelines, so that it exists outside the room you are standing in.
That is not about replacing you with a logo. It is so Rainbow & Spoon can explain itself when you are at a trade fair, or on holiday, or simply busy with a customer at the counter.
Question two
You said you wish more working women with a bit of disposable income came in. Your stock, your regulars and your reviews point at a slightly older customer who adores you.
Which should we aim at? There is no wrong answer, and we would rather you chose it now than discover it in November. Our instinct is to go deeper with the customer you already delight, and pick up the newer one through findability rather than by changing what you buy.
The target, in plain terms
You told us you want the website driving twenty per cent of sales, and that the shop is the real business. We think that is the right target and a sensible one.
Worth seeing what it actually means. At your average sale, twenty per cent is roughly two online orders a week. Thirty per cent is three.
That is the whole mountain. We are not turning Rainbow & Spoon into an online business, and we are not asking you to become one. We are taking the website from around one order a fortnight to two or three a week, using stock you already own and a mailing list you already have.
On that list. When we asked which half of the shop you would keep, you said your mailing list before you said your stock. That is exactly the right answer, and it is the cheapest route to those two orders a week. People who have already bought from you are far easier to reach than strangers, and nobody can switch that list off. Facebook and Instagram have already proved they can switch you off.
Question three
How many people are on your Mailchimp list, and roughly how often do you send to it at the moment? A rough number is fine.
The programme
We talk every Monday at 3pm, the slot you asked for, for half an hour. Held for the whole five weeks. You see everything before it goes anywhere near your website.
Your answers, your emails, your website, your Instagram, your reviews, your competitors. Then we write the positioning down properly, once, so that every decision after this one gets easier.
We also record exactly where you stand today, before we change a thing: what Google shows, how the site performs, and what the AI assistants say when somebody asks them for an independent women's boutique in Oxford. We do that now so we can show you the difference in November.
You seeThe positioning, written down. Friday 9 October.
The homepage, the About page and the core pages, written in your voice rather than a template's. This is where the heritage comes to the front instead of sitting three tabs deep, and where the courtyard stops being a footnote.
You also get the shopfront direction in writing this week, as promised in August. By Friday we will be able to tell you exactly what that sign needs to do and whether what you already have does it.
You seeAll the words, and the sign direction. Friday 16 October.
Colour, type, and how your logo is used and where. Your logo is not changing. What changes is that there is finally a rule for it, so the website, the sign, a swing ticket and an Instagram post all look like the same shop.
Then the findability work underneath the site: structured data, your Google listing, Search Console, and a machine-readable description of your business written directly into the code of the website, so that AI assistants can read Rainbow & Spoon properly and recommend it accurately.
This is the part that brings your site up to date with how people actually search now. More and more of them do not type into Google at all, they ask an assistant. A site without this is relying on that assistant guessing correctly about you, and it usually guesses badly.
You seeThe identity direction, and your listings corrected.
Everything goes onto the website you already have. Alongside that, the artwork a vinyl supplier or a printer will ask for, and a small set of Instagram templates you can use on your phone in two minutes.
You seeThe site, live. And your Canva templates.
A short set of brand guidelines, written to be used rather than admired. A plan for the Christmas run-in built around the gift guide you already make. And we re-run every test from week one and show you the before and after.
You seeEverything finished.
We walk you through the guidelines and the templates, hand over every file in every format, and full ownership transfers to you.
You seeThe lot.
The shopfront
Something we noticed in your photographs that is worth settling early, because there is money attached to it.
Your premises are magenta and lime green. The doors are magenta with lime frames, the fascia is pink over green, both street signs are pink over green. Your new logo is pink on pink, with no green in it at all.
So the shop you own and the logo you love are currently two different colour schemes, and the vinyl you are about to buy will reproduce the one that does not match the building.
Our recommendation is that the green stays and becomes an official part of the palette rather than an accident. It is already the shop, it is cheerful, it photographs well, and keeping it means you are not repainting anything.
Question four
Does that sit right with you? Or is the plan always to bring the shopfront round to pink when the vinyl goes up?
Either works. We just need to know before we draw anything.
Question five
Still outstanding from September, and the one that could change the order we do things in: did your current sign need any kind of council permission?
If the shopfront sits in a conservation area the timeline for anything permanent runs to months rather than weeks, and we would want to start that now.
Question six
Who is doing the vinyl, and what format do they want artwork in? If you have not chosen anyone yet, say so and we will give you a specification you can hand to anybody.
Being found
A small thing with a disproportionate effect. Right now your business is written four different ways across the places people find you: Rainbow & Spoon on the website, Rainbow and Spoon Boutique on Google and Facebook, Rainbow & Spoon Boutique on the signs, and R&S on your Instagram picture.
Search engines treat those as four slightly different businesses, which means the trust you have built gets split four ways. We are consolidating all of it to one name, used consistently, with the word boutique kept where it earns its place in search.
There is a second version of the same problem with your address. Independent Oxford and your own Instagram say Frideswide Square. Your website and your Google listing say 22 Park End Street.
Question seven
Which is correct for post, and for someone walking there? We will then make every listing agree, which on its own is one of the most useful things we can do for local search.
The other part of this is newer. More and more people now ask an assistant rather than a search engine: where is a good independent boutique in Oxford? We are building the underlying description of your business so that those assistants can read Rainbow & Spoon properly and describe it accurately, including that it is forty-four years old, family-run, and down a courtyard. We recorded what they currently say on 4 October, and we will show you what they say in November.
Two things you already own
The letter you were sent from Japan is the best piece of evidence this business has. A man comes in looking for a belt, you give him a safety pin, and he comes back with a stream of friends and his wife, then writes to you from Kawasaki on paper he coloured in himself.
It also contains the clearest statement of what we are here to fix. He addresses it to the lovely owner, I don't know your name. Complete devotion to a shop, and he never learned who either of you were.
Question eight
May we use that letter on the website, and would you be willing to write back and ask David whether he minds? One line from him is plenty.
And if there are others in a drawer, we would love to see them.
The second is the Independent Oxford feature. Those are the best photographs of Rainbow & Spoon in existence and somebody else has already paid for them.
Question nine
Could you ask Katy whether we can use the photographs from that shoot on your website? They already know you and it is a short email.
While you are there, it is worth telling them we are doing this work. They have been your single biggest source of new people this year and we intend to make much more of that relationship.
At the end
All of it sits on the website you already have. You are not buying a new one.
What is not included, as we agreed in August: ongoing monthly optimisation, paid advertising, running your social accounts, or new product photography. If you want any of that later we can talk about it separately.
One more thing
Your site is well built and it looks the part. That is not the issue and never was.
What it does not do is move. Nothing on it has any life: nothing arrives as you scroll, nothing transitions, no small moments of motion anywhere. That is ordinary for a site of its age, and it is one of the least expensive ways to make a website feel like it belongs to a shop full of colour rather than to a template.
We have ideas here, and we would like to put some of them in. Nothing dramatic, nothing that slows the site down or gets between a customer and the checkout. Small, well-judged movement, so that arriving on your homepage feels a little more like walking down the path.
This document is a small sample of what we mean.
Question ten, in three parts
First, how do you feel about that in principle? We are not touching the logo. This is about how the site behaves, not what it is made of.
Second, will Bitten Digital be comfortable with us working in the site at that level? They built it and they drew your logo, so it is their work as well as yours, and we would like to be straightforward with them about it.
Third, would you rather tell them yourself that this work is happening, or shall I have that conversation directly? Studio to studio is usually the easier route and I am very happy to make the call. Say the word and it is off your list.
One last thing
You run a forty-four year old boutique, founded by two artists, down a flower-filled courtyard.
You wrote in the questionnaire that you find it hard to big yourself up, and that you usually tell people you run a ladies clothes shop.
You kept your doors open on every one of the 1,258 days that Botley Road was shut. People write to you from Japan.
Our job over the next five weeks is to make sure nobody has to meet you to find that out.
ruko.studio · Rainbow & Spoon · October 2026
Ten questions. Answer by number to connect@ruko.studio, or bring them to Monday at 3pm.