A made-to-order custom apparel business needed a real online store. Not a template to fight with — a system built around how the work actually happens.
Haylee hand-presses custom graphic tees. Nothing is pre-made, which means the store can't work like a normal store — there's no inventory to list, no fixed set of products to photograph.
What there is instead: two blank-shirt brands, dozens of colours in each, a range of sizes and sleeve lengths, local pickup or shipping, and a catalogue of designs that grows every week.
Every off-the-shelf platform handles this the same way, by making you create a separate product for every combination. Hundreds of them. Then re-photograph and re-upload each time a design is added.
The whole project came down to one requirement: she had to be able to run all of it herself.
Haylee uploads a design once, as a transparent image. The site composites it onto every shirt-colour scene automatically — so a single upload produces the full set of product images, instead of an afternoon spent editing dozens by hand in a photo editor.
This is the difference between a store she uses and a store she avoids. It's also the kind of thing no template does, because it only makes sense once you understand how one specific business works.
Browse and search the design catalogue, then configure a shirt — brand, colour, size, sleeve length — with pricing updating live as the choices change. Cart and checkout throughout.
Stripe checkout, with every price calculated on the server so it can't be tampered with from the browser. Sales tax applied automatically, and a choice at checkout between flat-rate shipping and free local pickup.
Upload a design once as a transparent image; the system renders it onto each shirt-colour scene automatically. One upload, every variant, no manual image editing.
Designs, colours, pricing, brands, and discount codes are all managed by Haylee directly — from an iPad, with no developer involved. Adding a new design is a task, not a support request.
Orders arrive in a dashboard where one tap marks them shipped with tracking, ready for pickup, or personally delivered — and the customer is emailed automatically each time.
The full manufacturer palettes built in — 76 Gildan G640 colours plus Comfort Colors — with flags for what's stocked and what's a favourite, so ordering blanks and building the store stay in sync.
A password-protected collection for private designs shared only with specific customers, and a rush-order option for when a shirt is needed by the weekend.
Haylee has a professional online store with her own domain and branded email. She adds designs, changes prices, creates discount codes, and fills orders — all from her iPad.
She has never had to ask a developer to update anything.
“By far exceeded every expectation I had. Shannon helped turn every idea of mine into something bigger and better than I could have dreamed of! My website is far and beyond anything I could have done myself or with online templates.”
This one started with someone describing how she actually works, and what kept getting in the way. That's all it takes to begin.