The agency I worked for needed a large quantity of personalized mugs for a high-profile client, so the sublimation equipment was bought over night and help was hired to produce the coffee mugs. After the delivery was made and the project was completed, there were these special printers with special papers and heaps of equipment left, so my boss was like, hm!
Shortly afterwards I started working on a concept of a web shop where you could personalize the designs and order them. We came up with the brand name and soon enough, the logo was there. “Cool gifts”. Self-explanatory.
After the initial sketches, I started working on the look and feel of the page and I aimed high. Every design was applied on a 3D model and rendered as a still, animation and detailed view. Animation was then converted to AniGIF (old school) which appears in JS Carousel (new school :)) when a mouse cursor hovers over. So you can take a good look at the gift before personalizing and purchase.
The homepage features new additions that can be accessed through custom-made banners. On the right hand side there are partner banners and the shopping cart.
After completing the website, it was time for the back-end. This was also made from scratch, since there were no open source products that would fit the specific requirements.
The admins can manage products, categories, news, users, orders and archive.
In addition to the regular stuff you find here, there are maybe two or three features worth mentioning; complete image handling is AJAX based, the user is notified in every step of gift creation (order received, payment arrived, gift produced, package shipped), there are loyalty and discount codes (both in amount and percentage).
On the processing side, every design template is created by importing the graphics in Adobe Acrobat, adding the text fields to fit perfectly and embedding the fonts. Later in production at the push of a button JavaScript populates the text fields with user data. One quick examination later, the personalized design can be printed, cutting marks included. There is a similar function populating the stickers for the package, receipt for the customer and all the forms required at the postal office. All this reduces production time to a minimum.
Here are some of the designs.
After a couple of weeks, orders started coming in and it was not only mugs that customers wanted to personalize. Suddenly, we needed a larger warehouse 🙂
