Osborn Reserve

The problem

The photographs on the Shopify store were Donald's own, and good. The store around them was working against him. The home page had no heading, because its welcome line was set into the banner image, and no page linked to a collection. Three of its six collections were live, indexable and empty. There was no shipping page, no returns page, no About and no contact page, and on a phone the main image took 8.4 seconds to appear, behind a desktop score of 99 that hid it. The six product pages were the only addresses the business had with any search history, so whatever replaced the store had to keep them.

What got built

Every product and collection keeps the address Shopify gave it, /products/<slug> and /collections/<slug>, and every other old address answers with a permanent redirect, Shopify's nested product paths and its policy pages included, checked against the store's own sitemap on launch day. A shelf with nothing on it answers 404 and drops out of the sitemap rather than sitting in the index empty. The look is Bodoni on paper and ink, with the client's anchor redrawn as a vector so it can sit on a photograph, and seven Detroit Publishing Company plates of Chicago from the Library of Congress, tinted towards the ink and only ever laid on a dark band. The one clip is a warm light crossing the two eagle pins in their box, made from Donald's own photograph, which stays as the poster and as the still for anyone who has asked for less motion; the file is fetched once the page has loaded, and never at all under reduced motion. At checkout, five pieces or more opens payment with the bundle code already on it, and where post is charged, a step before payment asks where the order is going so the carrier can price the parcel for that address. Stripe's form then opens inside the site, in its own colours, with the price and the address already filled. Behind it, every written page is a document Donald edits, the journal is a CMS of its own inside the same back office, and the custom order form's questions are records he can add, reorder and rewrite, with a check in the build that fails if a question he invents is ever drawn or read back differently from the ones the site shipped with.

Details worth naming

• Every product and collection on the address Shopify gave it, so the six product pages keep their search history, and a permanent redirect for every other address the old store used.
• The pages the old store never had: Shipping, Returns, About and Contact, and a real heading on the home page where the old one was a picture of a sentence.
• A custom order builder of one row per question, with chips for the answers, two artwork uploads and a brief beside it that reads the answers back as one plain sentence. It names no price, because custom work is quoted by hand against the artwork.
• Five pieces or more opens payment with the bundle code already on it, and where post is charged, the carrier prices it for the address before the card form appears.
• The Minuteman tie bar sells as a Pre-order before it is cast, and a sold-out piece takes a name and an email and writes to everyone waiting when Donald puts it back in stock.
• Every paid order emails Donald with a button into the order, where he prices the parcel, buys and prints the label, and voids it if plans change.