Blending bespoke jewellery with an intuitive digital experience.

Besette came to us to design and build a new Shopify store for their jewellery collection. But behind the polished storefront was a much more complicated ecommerce challenge.

Their bespoke rings can be configured in hundreds of different ways, with different carat weights, settings and finishing options all affecting the final piece and its price.

Shopify gave us a strong foundation for the store. The challenge was making a highly configurable product fit into a platform that wasn't designed to handle that level of complexity.

A single Besette ring can represent more than 100 potential SKUs once every possible configuration is taken into account.

Customers might choose a different carat weight, add a hidden halo, change another detail of the setting or combine several options together. Each decision can affect the price, imagery and final specification of the ring.

Trying to represent every possible combination as a standard Shopify variant quickly runs into the platform's limits and would leave Besette managing an increasingly unwieldy product catalogue.

We needed to find another way.

The goal was to keep Shopify at the centre of the ecommerce experience while building a bespoke layer capable of handling the complexity that sits behind a made-to-order ring.

Taking the complexity out of Shopify

Rather than forcing hundreds of combinations into Shopify, we built a custom application specifically for Besette's configurable products.

The app gives their team somewhere to manage the information that doesn't naturally fit into Shopify. Carat options, hidden halos and other configurable details can each be created independently, with their own pricing and imagery.

Pricing introduced another layer of complexity. Besette sells internationally, so every option and additional cost needed to work correctly across multiple currencies rather than relying on a single fixed price.

Product imagery presented a similar challenge. With potentially hundreds of configurations, storing every asset against conventional Shopify variants wasn't practical. We created an image pipeline backed by Amazon S3, allowing imagery to be associated with individual configuration options without bloating the Shopify catalogue.

The result is a much simpler system for the Besette team to manage, despite considerably more complexity underneath.

A ring builder that feels simple to the customer

On the storefront, all of that complexity becomes a visual ring-building experience.

Customers can move through the available choices, configure their ring and see the product, imagery and price respond to the decisions they make. Different carat weights and optional details can be combined without the customer ever needing to understand how those combinations are represented behind the scenes.

The harder problem came when it was time to buy.

Shopify still needs something concrete to put into its basket and take through checkout. But because the customer's exact ring configuration doesn't exist as one of hundreds of permanent variants, we built a process that creates it only when it's needed.

When a customer finishes their ring and adds it to their basket, our application takes their configuration and dynamically creates a temporary Shopify variant containing the information required to complete the purchase.

From there, Shopify can do what it does best: manage the basket, checkout, payment and order.

Once the order has been processed and the configuration safely recorded, the temporary variant can be removed, keeping the underlying product catalogue clean rather than filling it with combinations that may only ever be ordered once.