Case study
A specialist catalogue that a small team can actually merchandise.
Golf equipment is a fitting problem disguised as a retail problem. Shafts, flex, hand, loft and lie mean a single product line explodes into variants, and a store that models that badly becomes unmanageable long before it becomes unprofitable.
01 / The problem
What was actually hard.
The catalogue is the hard part. Irons, gloves, headwear, shoes and accessories each carry different variant axes, and the naive approach — a product per permutation — produces thousands of near-duplicate records that nobody can merchandise, search, or keep in stock correctly.
Selling internationally compounds it. Pricing, shipping thresholds and delivery expectations differ by destination, and a threshold like free shipping over a given order value has to be enforced consistently at the cart, not implied in the copy.
02 / What we built
The system.
- A variant model that holds
- Products modelled with their real attribute axes rather than flattened into permutations, so stock, pricing and imagery stay attached to the right thing.
- Category and discovery structure
- Browsable categories with counts, filtering and search built over the attribute model, so a customer can narrow by the axes that actually matter to them.
- Cart-enforced shipping rules
- Order-value thresholds and destination rules applied in the cart, so what the banner promises and what the customer pays are the same number.
- Accounts, wishlist and returning customers
- Registration, wishlist and order history — the machinery that turns a one-off purchase into a second one.
- Merchandising a small team can run
- An admin surface built for a handful of people, where adding a line or running a promotion does not require an agency ticket.
03 / What carried over
Decisions worth reusing.
The parts of this build that we would apply again on a different problem in a different sector.
- Model the domain, not the screens
- Getting the variant model right early is what keeps a specialist catalogue manageable at a thousand SKUs. Retrofitting it is close to a rebuild.
- Rules belong in one place
- Shipping and pricing logic enforced server-side at the cart rather than repeated in templates, which is where the discrepancies customers notice come from.
04 / More work
Other builds.
Different sectors, the same delivery discipline.
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Encore Episode
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eSign Platform
An e-signature platform with envelopes, templates, a REST API and a tamper-evident certificate of completion behind every signed document.
Next step
Have something like this to build?
Start with a diagnostic. It is fixed-fee, time-boxed, and it will tell you honestly whether the thing is worth building — including when the answer is no.