Starting a digital revolution in premium home decor with Shade Love

In the new era of digital commerce, shoppers expect to be able to purchase and personalize everything from clothing to cars to makeup. So why, asked Shade Love Founder Bao Ho, should buying premium home decor be any different?

With a visionary’s passion, Bao is eager to revolutionize how home decor is bought and sold. Headquartered in New York City and just shy of a year old, Shade Love is punching above its weight, offering shades of exceptional quality at an affordable price.

The twist? A totally “self-serve” website that empowers shoppers to customize the shades and blinds they want to fit their unique spaces and places. This innovative approach not only gives customers the freedom to design their decor but also ensures they get exactly what they want without any compromises.

With the home decor industry showing signs of growth and potential, Bao noticed an opportunity in the window treatment space. Feeling that customer service was stagnating overall, Bao envisioned a makeover.

She looked to breakthrough brands like Sephora for inspiration:

Passionate about replicating this customer-centric approach online, Bao envisioned empowering shoppers with the freedom to customize their window treatments. She knew that providing this level of service required a sophisticated product configurator for customized orders on the Shade Love website.

The configurator, designed for ease of use, allows customers to select from hundreds of fabrics and customize other features. Customers can create and instantly visualize a unique design for their window treatments, making shopping convenient and enjoyable.

Bao immediately understood the value of the product configurator. Homeowners can experience a new level of creativity and ease in selecting the perfect window treatments.

Interior designers, decorators, and architects can do more business and streamline their clients' selection and ordering process.

Getting from a vision to the first lines of website code requires a lot of trust. For Bao, the value of building trustworthy partnerships is critical, and she was fortunate to have such a partnership with her website developer.

But four months into development, she realized that, given the short timeline to launch and the development of the technically complex product configurator, she needed a team.

Bao had a good idea of what her website development needs would cost, and she understood the design complexity of the product configurator. As she interviewed several agencies, Bao used a checklist of qualities to evaluate each team.

Her checklist included a team with:

• Expertise in Craft Commerce development

• Responsive customer service

• Excellent project management

• A focus on problem-solving

Foster Commerce’s focus on execution caught Bao’s attention. Fortunately, Foster Commerce also had pre-engineered software that could save Bao money and, most importantly, time.

When Bao found Foster Commerce, she felt a wave of relief. They not only checked the box for every item on her checklist but also surpassed her expectations.

With the Foster Commerce team in place, Bao felt renewed confidence to move forward.

Foster Commerce built Foster Checkout to add value for merchants using Craft Commerce. Foster Checkout is a pre-engineered, validated, and optimized checkout flow that saves valuable developer time and client resources.

When Bao saw that the Foster Checkout plugin was included in the Foster Commerce proposal, her decision was easier — a significant part of the website was already developed and saved precious time.

The Foster Checkout plugin also saved Bao tens of thousands of dollars in development costs while providing her customers with a seamless and user-friendly checkout experience.

For the Foster Commerce team, having ready-made software available to Craft Commerce clients is all in a day's work. But for Bao, it meant she could avoid trade-offs between conflicting priorities. Bao could keep the overall project within budget without sacrificing a user-friendly shopping experience for her customers.

Perhaps the most central feature of Shade Love’s website is its technically complex product configurator. The configurator allows customers to design their bespoke window treatments, which is vital to Bao's original vision and inspiration for her business.

Foster Commerce enthusiastically pursued this project. Within the project's first week, the team delivered a product configurator prototype to Bao.

This front-end proof of concept demonstrated that the Foster Commerce team understood the configurator concept. It also allowed the designer to see the final images' specs.

Receiving the prototype gave Bao immediate validation that she had chosen the right team of developers.

Next, the Foster Commerce team delved into the product configurator's most challenging aspect: its backend system. This complex task required a deep understanding of the product data and the Craft platform — precisely the type of technical problem the Foster Commerce team lives for.

The Foster Commerce team had two high-level requirements for the configurator:

1. It must be fast

2. It must not cause bloat in the website’s database every time a customer configures a unique product

The Foster Commerce team solved both these requirements using the same simple idea. The team built a custom endpoint that generates a product's structure, including the price, without creating a final product in the database.

This solution allows customers to experiment with various combinations of colors, drapery styles, and hardware as they explore and discover the perfect product for their space.

Then, Foster Commerce developers created a second custom endpoint that enables customers to add their preferred configuration to a cart for purchase. This endpoint behaves almost identically to the first but includes the final steps of converting the structure into an actual Commerce product.

This elegant solution drastically enhances the configurators' performance and optimizes the user experience. It also provides accurate product orders on the backend for Bao and her team.

Bao’s decision to hire Foster Commerce brought new energy into the project through expert project management.

In particular, Foster Commerce successfully coordinated the work of external contractors so that the project could stay on schedule.

As a matter of course, Foster Commerce makes projects and progress transparent to clients, which inspires confidence. Bao could see what tasks were moving forward and who was handling them.

Seeing that project management was safely in the hands of the Foster Commerce team freed Bao to attend to her part of the project. Bao had the headspace she needed to complete designs, and QA the entire site before launch.

Knowing that building a website was just the beginning of bringing her ecommerce business to life, Bao also hired Foster Commerce to provide post-launch support.

In choosing Foster Commerce, Bao has found a supportive team that is accessible.

The Foster Commerce team has designed its support so that clients can send messages through the team’s project management app and get a response quickly.

Bao trusts that the Foster Commerce team has her back and is doing what’s best for her and her business.

Today, Shade Love offers customers the best design selection, product quality, and pricing. With a brand new website launched and the configurator working, Bao is thrilled that her focus on developing a revolutionary user experience is paying off.

Bao anticipates that the next phase of website development will include back-office automation, which will further save time and costs. For example, Bao now translates incoming orders for her production teams by hand. With the volume of orders steadily increasing, manually translating orders won’t be practical.

Having orders translated automatically will allow Shade Love to shift its focus to other important aspects of the business, such as implementing marketing and SEO strategies.

At the launch of Shade Love’s new website, the Foster Commerce team celebrated alongside Bao and her team.

Customers can now create the precise look and feel they want for their window treatments.

Designers and architects can shop for and design unique custom shades from the comfort of their offices, sourcing a perfect fit for their clients’ spaces.

And Bao is satisfied with having brought her vision to life.

What’s not to love?