Blendo - a fully custom WooCommerce perfume store

The challenge

Blendo already had an audience: a fragrance store built around designer-inspired scents, carrying leading dupe houses like Lattafa, Afnan and Maison Alhambra, with a wide catalogue and an active customer club. What wasn't working was the website.

The previous site was slow. Not "a little heavy" - slow in the way that costs money: category pages that took forever to load, a cart that stalled, and a search that returned results long after the customer had given up. The outcome was entirely predictable - abandoned carts, lost sales, and customer complaints that had become routine. When a store sells hundreds of products, every second of waiting is a customer walking out.

The problem was neither the product nor the marketing. It was a store built on a pile of plugins, each adding more code, more queries and more weight - until the site could no longer keep up with the business.

What I built

A WooCommerce store built from scratch, fully custom. No off-the-shelf theme, no page builder, and no stack of plugins patching over one another.

• A modern WordPress architecture - the project runs on Roots Radicle: a Laravel-style structure with Blade templates and Composer-managed dependencies. That means organized code that can be maintained and deployed like any serious application, rather than PHP files accumulated over the years.
• Custom WooCommerce, not generic WooCommerce - product pages, categories, cart and checkout were rewritten around the way Blendo actually sells: browsing by house, by the fragrance that inspired it, by audience and by price range.
• No unnecessary plugins - every plugin that stayed does real work (shipping, loyalty club, accessibility). Everything else is written in code: faster, easier to maintain, and no surprises at the next update.
• Tailwind with custom animations - a clean interface with subtle motion through scrolling and add-to-cart, without heavy animation libraries.
• A mobile-first buying experience - most of Blendo's shoppers arrive on a phone, and the store was designed for them first.
• Merchandising built in - bundles, monthly deals, an outlet section and the customer club were all built into the store itself rather than bolted on as third-party plugins.

The result

A store that feels fast exactly where it matters: on category pages, in search, and on the way to checkout. Instead of apologizing to customers for a stuck website, Blendo now runs a large catalogue, brands, promotions and a loyalty club from one organized system.

Is your store losing customers because of the website? Get in touch - we'll start by finding out what's actually slowing you down.