Cladworks sold wall panelling. They were good at it, and almost nobody could find them. There was no real brand, no storefront, and no online sales whatsoever — every order came in by phone or over the counter.
I was their design and web function, solo, on and off over several years rather than as a single project with an end date.
Making cladding fit a shopping cart
The interesting problem was not visual.
Cladding is specified by finish, length, thickness and colour, and those multiply. A catalogue that looks modest on paper becomes thousands of combinations, and Shopify has a hard ceiling on variants per product. The obvious model — one product carrying every option — doesn't fit. The obvious workaround — a separate product per combination — technically fits and gives you a store nobody can browse and nobody will maintain.
So the catalogue got restructured around how people actually buy panelling: choose the finish first, because that's the decision customers care about and the one they arrive with, then narrow by the dimensions their job needs. That kept the variant count under the ceiling. More usefully, it matched the order of questions a trade counter would ask anyway.
Screen and street
The rest was everything else a customer sees. Identity, flyers, trifold brochures, product signage, vehicle livery, and the product and installation photography to feed all of it.
The advantage of one person doing all of that isn't efficiency. It's that the type on the van matches the type on the invoice matches the type on the site, without anyone having to write a brand guidelines document that nobody would read.
They went from no online sales at all to the storefront being a genuine channel. I've deliberately not put a percentage on that: a multiple measured from zero isn't a statistic.
The part that stayed with me
The variant problem didn't go away, it just changed shape. Years later at Bathroom Trade Hub I met the same class of thing — trade pricing across a catalogue that keeps moving, which Shopify's discount model also can't express — and that time I built a Remix app and a Python sync toolchain to solve it properly.
Cladworks is where I found out what the problem was.