Built by Corey See the live rebuild  ↗
Proposal · prepared for Leaf Clothing · 18 May 2026

A few specific fixes for leafclothing.co.uk

Leaf Clothing · Newcastle upon Tyne · website rebuild

I rebuild small-business sites in my spare time when I can see they are leaving conversions on the table. Three things stood out on mobile in the first ten minutes on the live site. Three findings below, then a working rebuild you can click through.

Open live preview  ↗ Read the three findings Reply to the proposal
Josie Smith inside Leaf Clothing on Pilgrim Street, helping a customer pick between a leather jacket and a yellow blouse, with the framed archive photo of the Pilgrim Street shopfront visible behind.
38-40 Pilgrim Street · Newcastle · since 1978

Brian on menswear, Josie on womenswear. 47 years on the same Newcastle street. Open the live preview ↗

01

The customer-facing email on every page of leafclothing.co.uk is the literal placeholder string "[email protected]" in the raw HTML, because the address is wrapped in Cloudflare's email-obfuscation cipher and never decoded server-side.

What I saw
View source on the homepage, the contact page, and the testimonials page. Each one renders the email as <a class="__cf_email__" data-cfemail="056960646366696a716d6c6b62343c323d456268646c692b666a68">[email protected]</a>. The hex blob is XOR-encoded against the first byte and decodes to leafclothing1978@gmail.com. The decode only fires if Cloudflare's rocket-loader JavaScript reaches the browser and runs successfully. A visitor on an ad-blocker, a script-blocker, or a slow mobile connection where the script times out, will see "[email protected]" sitting on the page where the address should be. Google's indexers also never resolve the cipher, so search results for "leaf clothing newcastle email" surface third-party directory entries (Cylex, Yell, NewcastleGateshead) above the official site.
Why it matters
Email is the only inbound channel besides walking through the door and calling 0191 232 9083. When the address is invisible to search and broken on the page, a first-time visitor who wants to write about a wedding suit fitting, a stock query, or a press feature falls back to the phone or, more often, to nothing. The cipher was supposed to defeat scrapers; in practice it defeats actual customers.
After rebuild
The rebuild renders leafclothing1978@gmail.com as plain readable text inside a mailto link, plus a clean structured-data <a href="mailto:..."> the indexers can follow. Bot mail volume is handled in Gmail with a simple filter rather than by hiding the inbox from real people.
02

The Brian-and-Josie 47-year story is the strongest credential on the floor, but on the live site it sits as a flat block of body copy on /our-store.html and is never named on the homepage that a first-time visitor lands on.

What I saw
The homepage carousel cycles through generic styling photos with no caption that names a person. The "About" content lives one click deep, on /our-store.html, in two paragraphs that mention "small family business" but do not name Brian or Josie unless the visitor scrolls to the customer review section. By contrast, the Drapers profile of the shop leads on Brian opening in 1978 at 23, and on Josie joining the menswear-and-womenswear double act after she and Brian married in 1981. That is the spine of the shop. None of it is on the front door.
Why it matters
Newcastle has a handful of independents on the same stretch and a great many high-street multiples. The thing that separates Leaf from the chain stores is that there are two named people on the floor who have been there 47 years. When that fact is not above the fold the visitor reaches the brand list and the brand list looks identical to every other boutique's brand list.
After rebuild
Brian and Josie are named in the hero copy, with the founding year and the menswear / womenswear split. The heritage block becomes the page's emotional centre, with a 1978-to-today timeline, the framed archival shopfront photo currently hanging inside the shop, and one customer quote that already calls Brian a Newcastle legend.
03

The site holds no LocalBusiness schema, no openingHoursSpecification, and no AggregateRating, so the Mon-Sat 9:30 to 17:30 hours and the testimonial wall are invisible to Google's structured search panel, which is the discovery path that matters most for a shop that does not sell online.

What I saw
Inspecting the source on the homepage, the contact page, and /testimonials.html: there is no <script type="application/ld+json"> on any of them. Google sees the address inside the visible HTML and the phone number on the contact page, but it sees no structured signal that says "this is a clothing store, here are its hours, here is its rating." Searches like "menswear pilgrim street", "tailor newcastle wedding suit", "womenswear independent newcastle" surface Cylex and Yell entries with LocalBusiness markup above the official leafclothing.co.uk result, even though leafclothing.co.uk is the canonical source.
Why it matters
No e-commerce means every conversion is a foot-through-the-door visit. The single biggest determinant of foot-through-the-door is whether a Newcastle phone search returns the shop in the local pack with hours and a five-star rating. The reviews exist (the testimonials page has eight of them, all positive). The hours exist. The structured data that surfaces those facts to Google does not.
After rebuild
The rebuild ships full ClothingStore schema (a LocalBusiness subtype) with PostalAddress, geo coordinates, telephone in E.164, openingHoursSpecification covering the late-Thursday hour, AggregateRating once a sourced number is agreed, and a FAQPage block mirroring the customer questions on the rebuild. The provenance Drapers wrote about gets surfaced where it belongs, inside the local pack rather than four pages down.
Pricing

Fixed scope, fixed price.

£2,000Fixed for the rebuild, one-off. £150Per month for hosting and ongoing care. £50Optional. Embedded chatbot trained on FAQs.

No retainer. No contract. No in-person visits, fully remote from Switzerland.

If the proposal lands, reply with two or three 20-minute slots in the next ten days for a video call. I take on three North East builds this quarter, and first confirmed wins the slot. If I do not hear back by 28 May 2026, the proposal site comes down.

See the live rebuild  ↗

A working preview you can click through. Opens in this tab.

leaf-clothing-newcastle.builtbycorey.com/preview/