Duffy's Creations
Re-platforming a personalised-print store off Shopify — with the personalisation Shopify couldn't handle cleanly
Overview
Duffy's Creations is a husband-and-wife studio in Hessle making personalised foil-pressed prints, keepsakes and scratch cards — each one built by hand around a customer's names, dates and photos. The catalogue runs to more than 200 made-to-order products, and almost every one carries its own set of personalisation options.
The Problem
On Shopify, capturing all that personalisation meant leaning on a third-party product-options app. But the app clashed with Shopify's own product variants: size, frame colour and mounting started showing as unavailable, so customers thought items simply couldn't be bought.
It was a trap. The app couldn't be switched off without losing personalisation entirely, yet leaving it on quietly cost sales every day. The two systems were never designed to coexist — and no amount of configuration was going to make them.
The Solution
We re-platformed Duffy's onto a headless store where personalisation and product variants are both first-class — and never fight each other. The entire catalogue of 200+ products moved across, with proper field types restored for every option: dropdowns, radios, colour and image swatches, photo uploads and dates, each with its own pricing, captured straight into the cart and order.
Crucially, nothing was lost in the move. We rebuilt every product's personalisation from the ground up and recovered the full option lists from the original store, so customers kept exactly the choices they'd always had — 88 option sets across 45 products, plus self-hosted swatch imagery served a fraction of the size. No bolt-on app, no conflict.
The operational side moved over too. Paid orders push straight into Royal Mail Click & Drop with tracking synced back automatically, so the studio never re-keys an order by hand. And all transactional email runs through Mailgun with delivery tracking — so order confirmations actually land in inboxes instead of spam folders.
The Results
A faster store, on a platform built for how Duffy's actually sells.
What We Built
Native Personalisation
Every option type — swatches, uploads, dropdowns — built into the product, not a clashing app
Colour & Image Swatches
Foil and card colours shown as real swatches, self-hosted and fast
Per-Option Pricing
Add-on choices carry their own price, captured cleanly through to checkout
100 PageSpeed
A headless front end that scores a perfect 100 where Shopify lagged
Self-Serve Manager
Pages, hero, branding and products all editable by the owner, no developer needed
Apple & Google Pay
Fast mobile checkout for an audience that buys on their phones
Royal Mail Click & Drop
Paid orders push straight to Click & Drop with tracking synced back — no manual re-keying
Tracked Email Delivery
Order emails sent and delivery-tracked through Mailgun for reliable inbox placement
Inside the Store
The live storefront — fast, on-brand, and built for how Duffy's actually sells.
What This Demonstrates
Root-Cause Diagnosis
Finding the real conflict, not just the symptom
Migration Expertise
200+ products moved with nothing lost
Performance Engineering
A perfect PageSpeed score on a real store
Commerce Platform Depth
Personalisation, pricing and checkout, owned end to end
Stuck on Shopify?
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