The project
A Shopify store built to sell made-to-order products
We designed and built a custom Shopify store for Grain Over Sands, a brewing supplies brand in Grange-over-Sands, on the south Cumbrian coast. The standout is a bespoke recipe builder that lets customers create their own beer recipes and buy them as unique products through the normal checkout, the kind of made-to-order selling a standard store cannot handle on its own.
- Sector
- Brewing supplies
- Location
- Grange-over-Sands, Cumbria
- Platform
- Shopify
- Build
- Custom Shopify app
- Standout
- Bespoke recipe builder
- Management
- Fully self-managed
What was the challenge?
Selling a made-to-order product onlineGrain Over Sands sells brewing supplies, and wanted customers to be able to build and buy their own personalised beer recipes online. That is a made-to-order product, and a standard ecommerce store is not built to sell something a customer assembles themselves before they pay for it.
The store also had to be easy for the team to run day to day, with full control over products, content and stock, and the room to grow as the range and the orders increased.
How did we approach it?
Shopify, plus a recipe builder built into checkoutWe built the store on Shopify for the reliability and the room to scale a growing ecommerce brand needs, then built the recipe builder as a bespoke Shopify app wired directly into the buying flow, rather than forcing the product to fit an off-the-shelf plugin.
Each recipe a customer creates becomes a unique product that moves through Shopify's normal checkout, so a personalised order is handled the same way as any other, with no manual work from the team behind the scenes.
What did we build?
A self-managed store with a custom buying experienceThe result is a custom Shopify store doing something most stores cannot. Customers build their own beer recipe from scratch, choosing the ingredients they want from the product range, setting their own weights, and adding their own brewing method, then see it priced and buy it as a unique product through the standard checkout, fully integrated with Shopify.
Behind the scenes the team keeps full control through a clean CMS, with automated inventory and product management, so the store runs day to day without depending on a developer and has the headroom to grow with the business.
They created a fantastic online shop and website for us, and weren't phased by the addition of a bespoke recipe builder. Great communication and support through the whole process. The end results exceeded expectations and brought our vision to life.
From the studio
Why a custom build was the right call
A made-to-order product like a custom beer recipe is exactly where an off-the-shelf plugin tends to fall short. Building the recipe builder into Shopify's own checkout meant the personalised orders behave like any other order, which keeps it simple for customers and simple for the team to run. That groundwork is what lets the store scale without creating extra work.
Miles Debinski, Co-Founder & Technical Lead at Digital Otter