We started by reviewing the designs provided by Observador, making very small adjustments and breaking it up into smaller pieces, called design blocks.

There was much debate over what e-commerce solution to use for The Collection. We considered two alternative options:

– a full WordPress website with Woocommerce as the e-commerce engine;

– a hybrid architecture, combining the editorial strength of WordPress with the e-commerce capabilities of Shopify.

Both had pros and cons. In the end, we settled on the latter for the sake of website speed and reliability. This meant we needed to build a bespoke syncing mechanism allowing products to be imported into the WordPress environment, where visitors could read articles but also seamlessly add products to their cart and checkout, without ever noticing they were moving accross two separate platforms.