This week on The Marketing Factor, I talked with Xavier Armand, founder of The Vaan Group, a Shopify platinum agency behind some of the sharpest DTC sites in beauty, luxury, and home. Xavier has been deep in the weeds on how AI is actually changing (and not changing) the design and development process for e-commerce brands.
What Your Agency Isn't Telling You About Design, Dev, and AI
"The best performing stuff is the ad hook that has the matching landing page that has the matching PDP that has the great emails."
Simple. Obvious. And almost nobody actually builds it that way.
Here's what came out of this conversation that brands should actually know:
Ask your designer to do better work, not faster work.Xavier's take on AI for designers -- use it to raise the quality of the deliverable, not just reduce the hours. That means better presentations, turning static images into video for mood boards, stronger art direction concepting. If your agency is using AI to just cut time and pocket the margin, that's worth a conversation.
Your Figma file structure directly affects your site timeline.This one flew under the radar but it matters. The reason dev timelines blow up on bespoke builds is that design files aren't engineered for the development pipeline. The best agencies are now pairing a design systems lead directly with a tech lead to make files dev-ready before a single line gets written. If you're starting a new site project, ask your agency how they're structuring handoffs. It'll tell you a lot.
Code generation tools don't work on complex builds the way you think.Vibe coding and AI dev tools are real -- Xavier is already seeing it in staging environments. But for anything bespoke, the promise of "just generate the site" breaks down fast because every section is different. For brands: this technology is coming for simple builds and template-based sites. For anything with a distinct look and feel, you still need experienced people running it.
The 5-minutes-a-day rule for AI.Xavier's framing for AI inside his own org: find every repeatable workflow and save each person five minutes a day. Doesn't sound like much. Across a team, over a year, it's significant. Same applies to your brand team -- start with the stuff you do every single week, not the moonshots.
The full episode goes deeper on how the design-to-dev handoff actually works inside a high-output Shopify agency and what Xavier learned from building his own Claude environment from scratch.