Client Showcase: Japandi Inspired

How we built a fast, fully custom online store for an Australian 3D printing studio — no bloated plugins, no monthly platform fees.

When the team behind Japandi Inspired came to us, they had a beautiful product range — sculptural vases, table lamps and desk objects, 3D printed to order in Australia from plant-based materials — and a clear brief: they wanted an online store that felt as calm and considered as the pieces themselves.

Off-the-shelf platforms would have got them online quickly, but at the cost of ongoing subscription fees, template sameness, and plugin bloat that slows everything down. Instead, we designed and built a completely custom store from the ground up.

What We Built

A storefront that reflects the brand. Japandi design is about restraint — warm minimalism, natural tones, nothing unnecessary. We carried that through every page, from the homepage hero to the checkout. The result loads fast on any device, with a mobile experience designed with the same care as desktop.

Product pages built for made-to-order retail. Every piece comes in multiple colours, so we built live colour swatches with per-colour photography, real-time stock levels, and design attribution for the maker community models the studio prints under licence.

Smart shipping calculation. Rather than flat-rate guesswork, the store calculates shipping from the actual weight of the cart, modelled on Australia Post parcel bands — with free standard shipping automatically applied over the threshold.

Secure online payments. Checkout is powered by Airwallex, with card details never touching the store's own server. Orders confirm instantly and customers receive an automatic email receipt.

A complete back office. The owners manage everything from a private admin panel: orders move through a simple workflow (paid → printing → shipped → delivered), stock adjusts automatically with every sale, product photos are optimised on upload, and customer enquiries land in a built-in inbox that syncs with their email — replies work both ways.

Privacy-first analytics. Instead of handing customer data to a third-party analytics giant, we built lightweight, self-hosted analytics into the site itself. The studio can see visitors, popular products and the paths customers take through the store — with no tracking cookies and no consent-banner clutter, because nothing identifying is ever stored.

SEO from day one. Structured product data for Google rich results, automatic sitemaps, canonical URLs and clean semantic markup are all baked in — not bolted on.

Why Custom Beats a Template

It's a fair question: why not just spin up a Shopify or WooCommerce site? For some businesses that's the right answer — but for Japandi Inspired, custom won on every count that mattered:

• No monthly platform fees or transaction surcharges. The store runs on lightweight, self-managed hosting with payments processed through their own Airwallex account at direct rates — no platform taking a cut of every sale.
• Speed. No theme framework, no plugin stack, no third-party scripts fighting for bandwidth. Pages are server-rendered and typically load in well under a second — which matters for both customers and Google rankings.
• Features shaped to the workflow, not the other way around. Made-to-order retail has quirks (per-colour stock and photography, print-queue order statuses, design attribution) that off-the-shelf platforms handle awkwardly, if at all.
• Ownership. The client owns the code, the data and the customer relationship outright. Nothing is held hostage by a platform subscription.

This is the same approach we take with custom web apps and business software more broadly: understand how the business actually operates, then build exactly that — whether it's an online store, an internal tool, or an integration between systems you already use.

The Result

A store that costs nothing in platform fees, loads in a fraction of the time of a template site, and is genuinely theirs — every feature built for how they actually work, and nothing they don't need.

Browse the finished store at japandiinspired.com — and if you're in the market for a sculptural piece for your own shelf, we can vouch for the Riva Flower Vase.

Stride IT is a Perth-based managed IT and web development provider. We design, build and manage custom websites and e-commerce stores for Australian businesses. From online stores to internal business tools, we build software that fits how you actually work. Get in touch for a no-obligation discussion about your project.