How a Busy Dad Built a Thriving Danish Design Shop with WooCommerce

Building Designgrotten on WordPress and WooCommerce

Thomas built Designgrotten in spare hours, juggling a full-time project manager role and family life. He needed a system that didn’t demand constant coding, so he picked WordPress for its stable core and WooCommerce for e-commerce features out of the box. That combination let him focus on sourcing design pieces rather than writing low-level code.

Custom Theme and Feed Mashup

Starting with the Argentum theme, Thomas created a child theme to avoid changes getting overwritten by updates. He added a module on the homepage to showcase new products and wrote a small function in functions.php to merge posts, products, and customer feedback into a single RSS feed. With custom code he also ensured each item included its thumbnail, giving a richer look for RSS-sourced email newsletters.

Adding Feedback and Designer Taxonomy

To highlight customer stories, he set up a custom post type called “feedback”. This let him share testimonials alongside product entries. For blog posts he created a “designers” taxonomy to tag entries by designer name, helping readers filter posts and learn about individual creators in the industrial design world.

Savings Through Automation

Time is scarce so Thomas automated the newsletter process with Mailchimp’s RSS-to-email feature. It’s not as personal as hand-written notes, but opening and click rates are solid enough to skip manually crafting each update. He also bought WooCommerce Follow-Up Emails and combined it with WooCommerce Custom Status to send messages at key moments.

Creating Custom Order Statuses

Instead of typing comments each time an order moved forward, Thomas added three new statuses: money-received, packed, and delivered. He tweaked the plugin code to hook these statuses into Follow-Up Emails so customers received updates automatically when their order shifted stages. The feedback from customers on these messages has been very positive, and it save Thomas hours every week.

Essential WooCommerce Plugins

Over time he installed a suite of plugins to cover shipping, reporting, and user subscriptions:

• WooCommerce CSV Export for better tax reporting
• WooCommerce Custom Status to define new order states
• WooCommerce Follow-Up Emails for automated customer messages
• WooCommerce Subscribe to Newsletter to grow his list at checkout
• WooCommerce Table Rate Shipping for accurate postal rates
• WooCommerce Variation Swatches and Photos to improve product selection
• Stealth Publish to hide drafts and unpublished images

Looking Ahead and Gaps in WooCommerce

Thomas also shared areas where WooCommerce could be stronger: easier manual order creation in the backend, deeplinking directly to product review forms, and a more flexible status-to-email mapping interface. He hopes future releases will address these pain points.

Results and Community Response

The customizations and automations helped Thomas handle orders more efficiently, improve customer communication, and free up time to grow his product selection. He remains active in forums, offering tips and code snippets, and invites feedback from fellow store owners who want to know how to apply his methods.