Kaleido Afrique
Luxury pan-African homeware ecommerce on custom WooCommerce, complex multi-warehouse split shipping wired into checkout.
Luxury pan-African homeware ecommerce on custom WooCommerce, complex multi-warehouse split shipping wired into checkout.
Custom WooCommerce build with multi-warehouse split shipping, luxury editorial styling and 100% brand-owned checkout.
Kaleido Afrique curates pan-African homeware from independent designers across the continent. The old site sat on a templated Shopify theme that made every piece look identical, no room for editorial, no support for the multi-warehouse split shipping the business actually runs on. We rebuilt it from scratch on WooCommerce.
Off-the-shelf themes on Shopify or WooCommerce are built for volume, not curation. Kaleido was hitting the ceiling of what a template could do: editorial product stories were living outside the store, the checkout couldn't handle split shipping from multiple African warehouses, and every design update needed a plugin workaround.
Long-form product stories, artisan bios and collection notes as first-class content, not blog posts stapled onto the store.
Orders split across warehouses in South Africa, Kenya and Ghana with per-item routing at checkout, not after.
Every checkout step designed to match the editorial identity, no default Woo screens, no Shopify Payments lock-in.
Full art direction across category, PDP, cart, checkout and post-purchase emails, every screen intentional.
We built Kaleido as a hand-coded WooCommerce theme in PHP, with a custom checkout flow and a multi-warehouse shipping engine. No page builder, no theme framework, no plugin dependencies for the parts of the store that actually make money.
Custom post types for artisan, collection, editorial and press. Categories and attributes shaped around real product hierarchy, not default Woo taxonomies.
Hand-coded PHP theme, custom cart drawer, custom multi-step checkout, custom order confirmation, every step of the funnel authored on-brand.
Custom logic that routes each cart item to its origin warehouse, calculates per-warehouse shipping, and generates split fulfilment orders in the backend.
Kaleido now curates freely, adds artisans and collections without dev support, and processes multi-warehouse orders without spreadsheets. Every checkout screen is on-brand, every editorial page is a first-class content type, and every product loads sub-2s on a phone.
Every technical choice is documented, with no proprietary lock-in and no dependencies your team cannot audit.
Every custom WooCommerce build, editorial content, custom checkout, multi-warehouse routing, is quoted after a brief call. Integrations, warehouses and payment routes all move the number. Fixed price up-front, every scope item on the record.
Shopify is fine at low volume with default requirements. As soon as you need custom checkout, split shipping, multi-warehouse routing, editorial content models or your own payment stack, you're paying Shopify fees for things WooCommerce does natively with a custom theme. For luxury brands, WooCommerce almost always wins on flexibility and margin.
Yes, Kaleido was a Shopify → WooCommerce migration. We move product data, categories, customer accounts, order history, blog content and SEO redirects. Zero downtime on switchover, and we keep the URLs intact so SEO rankings survive.
Yes. We integrate every major South African and international gateway, Peach Payments, Yoco, Stripe, PayFast, Ozow, PayGate. Multi-currency, 3DS, subscription-ready. Custom implementation, so you're not stuck on the default plugin flow.
Based in Johannesburg, we work with ecommerce brands across South Africa, pan-African, UK and EU. Everything's remote-friendly and delivered on a shared workspace.
Other projects from the studio.
“The team stays on every call. It's the reason our site works instead of just looking nice.”
The same team that built Kaleido Afrique works on every project. Tell us what you need and we will show you how we would approach it.
