Official Watches
A luxury watch retailer taken off Shopify onto a site they own, with the whole operating system that runs the business built behind it.
Stock, enquiries, deals, servicing and the paperwork all in the one place, on a system built for the shop rather than bought off a shelf.
- What I did
- Design · Front end build · Back office build · Migration
- What it is
- Custom storefront · Custom CRM · Mail and messaging integration · Document generation
- Who it is for
- Retail replatform, off Shopify
- Status
- Launching soon
The problem
A shop front they rented, and no system behind it.
The website was Shopify. Everything else was spreadsheets, inboxes and people remembering things.
Stock lived in one place and enquiries in another. Deals lived in somebody’s head. Valuations and paperwork got made by hand every single time. Shopify was running the storefront and nothing else, so the actual business of selling a watch was happening outside the system they were paying for.
Then there’s ownership. A theme on a rented platform puts a ceiling on what you can build, and a monthly bill under everything you’ve already built.
What I did
Rebuilt the front, and built the back office behind it.
Two halves of one job. A new storefront, designed and built from scratch, replacing the Shopify theme completely. Behind it, the system the business runs on: stock, enquiries, deals, customer conversations, servicing and paperwork, all in one place.
The back office is the half that changes the day to day. An enquiry arrives and lands in one inbox whether it came by email, form or WhatsApp. It becomes a deal. The deal produces the invoice and the branded valuation without anybody opening a template. That last part sounds minor. It isn’t.
Underneath all of it is a full CRM, built rather than bought. The customer is the record everything hangs off: their watches, their conversations, their valuations, the deal they are in the middle of, the jobs sat with the service centre, the task somebody has to do on Thursday and who did what last. Staff will work the day from a list rather than from memory.
The thing that matters commercially is that it is one place. Not a shop platform, plus a separate inbox, plus a spreadsheet of deals, plus a diary, plus a document template on somebody’s desktop, each with its own login and its own monthly fee and none of them talking to the others. One system, owned outright, that the whole shop runs on.
What the back office covers
Scope rather than screens. This is the part that took the work, and it’s not something to hand a competitor.
- Customer records, with the whole history against the person
- Stock and inventory, as the single source of truth
- One enquiries inbox across email, forms and messaging
- A deals pipeline from first contact to sale
- Tasks and follow ups, so nothing waits on somebody remembering
- An activity trail of what happened, and who did it
- Email integration for Gmail and Microsoft accounts
- WhatsApp conversations attached to the customer
- Service centre for repairs and servicing jobs
- Invoices and branded documents, generated not typed
- Valuations and provenance certificates
- Social scheduling
- Separation between businesses, so it is not tied to one shop
What changed
Not live yet, and here’s exactly where it is.
The storefront and the back office are both built. The public site is still on Shopify while I finish the migration and get the team across, and staff onboarding happens the week before the switch.
Before
The Shopify shop, still live today
After
The rebuild, waiting to go
So it hasn’t launched, and I’m not going to write it as though it has. What it does show is scope. It’s the biggest thing on this site, front and back, done by one person, with the paperwork and the customer conversations handled rather than left as somebody else’s problem.
Status: launching soon. This project has not launched yet. Everything above describes what’s built, not what’s in use.
Want something like this
If the Official Watches story sounds like your business, tell me about it.
No pitch and no obligation. Tell me what you’re running on now and what’s going wrong with it, and I’ll tell you straight whether it’s worth doing.