Brief

Henry, the owner of ConcreteSchoolyard, is an entrepreneur from Bristol.
We met some years back and funnily one of the first questions that Henry asked me was "How can I let my customers customize the products I offer?"
Years went by, he approached me with the same question.

Approach

One of the barriers that shop owners usually face, is the limitations of shop builders, and services they use.
Once they invest in a service, it's harder to move on to another. With all the costs and manual work, it's not worth it.
I didn't want to introduce another service or solution that would cost extra.
At first I developed a native plugin that would let Henry to identify which products offer customization, upload mockups and define customization options, but there was one barrier. Once the customer finishes customization, they can't see their customized image, there was no way to use native functions for this specific problem.
I discussed the barrier with Henry, and introduced him to the new possibilities.
Most shop builders offer a solution called "headless", meaning you can use their backend and have freedom over how your site looks, or functions when a customer interacts with it. He welcomed the idea, and at this point he wanted a fresh look for the website as well, something that's playful, fun, has character, and is multilingual.

Where it landed

With the headless solution, it's important to use the power of CMS and never let static text exist in the code, specially if the site needs localization and translation.
ConcreteSchoolyard now exist in 2 languages (more to come).