The team at Project Merchandise came to us for help in disrupting their sector. Their mission is to provide organisations with sustainably sourced merchandise and they needed a complete redesign and rebuild of their website to position them as sector leaders.

How did we deliver? 

Their original website relied heavily on pre-made themes, page builders, and third-party plugins. To give them a website as unique as them we reconstructed the website from scratch.

We used a custom block library supported by WordPress’ Gutenberg editor, all powered by code manually crafted by our developers. The advantage of this approach being its ensures maximum optimisation of the codebase, which in practical terms means a fast and efficient experience for Project Merchandise’s customers on the front end. Building in this way also provides an easy, intuitive editing experience for administrators on the back end of the website.

Over the past two years, as Project Merchandise has expanded, we’ve worked together to implement cutting-edge features to support their business expansion and retain a positive user experience.

One notable addition is an intuitive inquiry system, enabling potential customers to select multiple products and customise details like logo uploads and quantities, creating a comprehensive inquiry for their branding requirements. Our development team coded this functionality, ensuring it wasn’t off-the-shelf but tailored precisely to Project Merchandise’s needs.

As Project Merchandise continues to expand, the website has grown accordingly in size. This could have lead to slower load times and a diminished user experience. To prevent this, our development team implemented Redis caching. This approach serves to efficiently cache popular pages and products, ensuring near-instant loading times when navigating between products, thereby enhancing the overall user experience.

In addition, our development team collaborated with Project Merchandise to integrate an external search engine into the website. This enhancement accelerates search results, minimising delays and highlighting key product categories and featured items during seasonal events, thus further optimising user engagement.