Tortoise+Black

What I did for Tortoise+Black

Tortoise+Black is a premium eyewear brand. The work was an accordion-style purchase flow built on top of WooCommerce: users upload their prescription, choose lens type, preview tints in real time, and bounce between product types without losing data.

The bits that mattered most:

• Home-trial stock logic. Trial items use separate inventory so real stock is not depleted by browse-and-return.
• Prescription persistence across the multi-step session.
• Supplier-workflow triggers fired by specific product combinations, audit-trailed on the admin side.
• Built on top of WooCommerce but extended past it where the standard checkout could not carry the brand's purchase logic.

How it helped the team

Premium e-commerce only works if the purchase flow honours the brand. Prescription glasses have an inherently complicated journey: optical data, lens types, tints, frames, supplier routing. Most stores hide this complexity behind a clipboard-checklist UX. We built it as a real product experience instead, with the brand's design language carried through every step.

On the admin side, the supplier-workflow triggers meant the team did not have to manually route orders. Specific product combinations did the routing themselves, with a clean audit log so the team could see what fired and when.

Why this way

E-commerce engineering is where most boutique brands quietly break. Too much logic outside the platform's defaults, too many invisible failure modes when configurations get exotic. The Tortoise+Black flow held up because:

• Every edge case was specced before shipping. Worked alongside the brand owner before writing code.
• Separate stock pools for trial vs purchase items.
• Session persistence across multi-step flows, so users never lose data on a refresh.
• Admin audit trail for every supplier trigger.
• Extend WooCommerce, do not fight it. The platform stays the platform.

How I would describe working together

Direct with the brand owner. Spec sessions before each block of work, then I built it. No surprises in either direction. The brand owner stayed in the driving seat on UX decisions; I owned the engineering and made the platform defaults stretch as far as they could before introducing bespoke logic.