Pulpa Shop

WooCommerce theme with React store locator

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Pulpa - WooCommerce store by Chop-Chop

Meet Pulpa

A Wroclaw-based fashion designer brand

PULPA is an independent clothing brand founded by Marta Maruszczyk in 2011 in Wroclaw, Poland. Her minimalistic, neat style is in line with our esthetical taste, so when she reached out to us for help with the development of her newly re-designed website, we immediately knew this was something we would want to showcase after finishing the work. Another important aspect for us was that her boutique is based in Wroclaw – actually less than a kilometer from our headquarters. We strongly identify with our city and working with other local entrepreneurs is a great experience.

Pulpa - WooCommerce store by Chop-Chop

Opportunity

Having started almost 7 years ago, PULPA is already a well-established label among independent clothing brands in Poland, with a loyal group of customers – mainly women in their 20’s and 30’s. Most customers who get attracted by what Marta creates are people generally interested in visual arts, fashion (obviously!) and current trends. Therefore, the visual part of the venture was the most important one.

Since PULPA’s previous website was created in 2014, it was just about time to come up with something fresh to accommodate changing tastes and meet current technological standards. When the page was created the focus was mainly laid on desktop users, while nowadays almost 50% of page openings are from mobile phones. The design itself was also a bit outdated so it was a good opportunity to show customers something more esthetically pleasing and in line with nowadays’ standards (without being a mere copy of another site).

Technology & Solutions

The previous instance of the site was already running on WooCommerce and it was a natural choice in this case too. With the number of daily orders between several and several dozen, there was no need for anything more complex. On the other hand, we needed the flexibility of WordPress to make sure the page reflects the design and its backend is user-friendly – especially considering the fact that the brand owner would edit it herself and she wanted to capitalize on the previous site’s experience.

Since the new site needed to be a step forward, the new design included several new features that would make it more user friendly – for example:

  • multi-language with currency changing automatically,
  • AJAX-loaded wishlist in a sidebar,
  • cart in a sidebar,
  • ability to get back to the store page by scrolling down from a product page,
  • collection slider.

On top of that there were a few new functionalities that we needed to implement in the backend:

  • wide variety of discount options (by a custom group, a category, etc.),
  • discounts on newsletter sign-up,
  • ability to create and edit emails sent to clients depending on order status.

Challenges

Many of these features could be implemented via a plugin. However, since most of the store’s code was custom, we had to ensure that there were no conflicts. It meant swapping plugins a few times in some cases but eventually, we managed to make everything work together.

Another very important issue was page speed. Every plugin negatively affects page speed, while some combinations of plugins slow down the page significantly. This meant we had to put a lot of effort into ensuring the page works smoothly – especially to mitigate the negative effects of using WPML and WooCommerce combined. Our team managed to achieve satisfying results by reducing the number of queries on the page, making the code modular, and implementing lazy loading. It would be more difficult if there were significantly more products, but in this case, it played out well.

Lastly, there was a ton of work adjusting the WooCommerce structure to the design. The visuals were prepared specifically to please esthetically and be user-friendly – it was our responsibility to take care of the technical side of things. Therefore, we rebuilt the default WooCommerce store page (featuring all categories and all products) and the product page from scratch. Thanks to that, the design was ideally reflected but we had to be very careful not to break something.

Conclusion

Even though the simple and minimalistic design could suggest the opposite, it was not an easy project for us. There were multiple problems we had to cope with in the process – the ones listed in this article are just a fraction. Pages that are not overloaded with detail require extra attention when coding their front-ends as all inconsistencies are noticeable immediately – nothing will distract users’ attention. This was exactly the case here and we are very happy with how it eventually looks! We managed to ensure that regardless of the screen resolution, the front-end looks and works as desired.

We are also really satisfied (and the client seems to share our view :)) with the fact that we managed to implement almost all functionalities originally requested. This way we achieved an e-store that is user-friendly for both the clients and the owner. All in all, a great experience and definitely the knowledge we learned in the course of the development will benefit our clients in future projects.

Working with Chop-Chop was a great experience! Not only did they code my WooCommerce store almost ideally as per the design but, most importantly, they were invaluable in advising the best solutions. Intuitive and easy-to-use admin panel is extremely important to me as the store owner and the team at Chop-Chop were really attentive to ensure that.

Marta Maruszczyk Avatar

Marta Maruszczyk

Fashion Designer, Owner of Pulpa