Fun Cases

We built the new theme from scratch around how people shop for phone cases. It has a mega menu with trending collections and products, predictive search, a native wishlist, and a slide-out cart that shows progress towards free shipping and a free gift.

Every section can be edited in the theme editor and the colour palette is a theme setting, so the in-house team can restyle or rearrange pages without a developer.

With 20,000 designs, customers shouldn't have to check compatibility on every product. The site asks for their phone model once and remembers it. From then on, every product image in collections, search results and product pages shows the case on that exact phone.

This removes the biggest source of doubt when buying a phone case: whether the design the customer likes will fit the phone they own.

We built SEO into the rebuild from the start: content architecture, internal linking, technical foundations, and a content programme tied to the merchandising calendar.

Fun Cases have since reached #1 on Google UK for 'Phone Cases', one of the most competitive category terms in the market.

We run paid media on Google and Meta, with combined spend of around £35,000 a month and blended ROAS consistently above 8. Search, Shopping, Performance Max and paid social campaigns are all optimised against product margins rather than top-line revenue alone.

We manage the spend week to week as the catalogue grows.

Fun Cases run their stock, warehouse, shipping, printing, returns, content and customer service from one piece of software we built for them. Each person has their own login, with a role and access to only the tools they need. Several of the tools started as separate apps and were brought under the one login later, with their data.

The software saves Fun Cases about 20 hours of work a day, worth more than £30,000 a year. The screens in this chapter are example screens, redrawn with sample data.

The planning screens show what's in stock, what's on order and what has run out, and hold every purchase order. They read the warehouse records directly, so there's no copy of the data and no sync to wait for. The buyer and the owner use them.

The overview shows units in stock, stock value at cost, low and out-of-stock lines and the top movers of the last 7 days. A purchase order can be written by hand, imported from a CSV file or generated from the forecast, and an order that hasn't arrived shows as stock on order everywhere else.

Off-the-shelf warehouse software was either too big or too limited for Fun Cases, so we built their own. Warehouse staff use it all day on rugged Android phones with barcode scanners, to book stock in, move it, find it, pick orders and run stock takes. Every scan records a stock movement and updates the stock held at each location. Booking in is three steps: the SKU, the location and the quantity.

Each scan is saved on the device before it's sent, and sent again if the wifi drops. A note is added to the Shopify order when it's picked, pressed and packed. Timekeeping is built in, with a points score for picks, book-ins, moves and stock takes.

The warehouse system was moved across from an earlier custom app. Every record kept its original ID, so the QR codes already on shelves and boxes carried on working.

The forecast works out what to order from each supplier and how much. It's a statistical calculation based on the units that left stock in the last 30 days, read from the warehouse movement log. The buyer picks a supplier, a delivery date and how many days of cover they want.

One-off adjustments of 50 units or more are left out. If a SKU was out of stock for part of the period, its daily rate is worked out over the days it was in stock. Seasonality is twelve monthly figures the buyer enters by hand, and quantities are rounded up to whole packs. Every number is shown, and any line can be changed before the order is created.

A stock cover page runs the same calculation forward for 12 months to show when each SKU will run out. An accuracy page compares each forecast with what was used afterwards.

A packer scans an order number at the bench. The software reads the order from Shopify, and a set of rules decides the size and service from the product type, the shipping method chosen at checkout and the delivery country.

The label is created through Royal Mail Click & Drop and sent straight to the bench label printer. The order is then fulfilled in Shopify with its tracking number. Scanning an order that has already been dispatched never buys a second label.

The software sorts the open orders into groups such as next day, express and standard, oldest first. The print operator presses one button for a group. Nothing prints by itself when an order arrives.

After that press the software builds every picking slip and design sheet from the workshop's existing print templates, picks the printer that will be free soonest and sends the job. A batch is joined into one file for each printer, with the slips and the designs in the same order so the two stacks match. Once the printer confirms, the order is tagged as printed in Shopify.

Customers book a return on a portal. They enter their order number and postcode, pick the items and a reason, and choose how to settle it: keep the item for a partial refund, send it back with a Royal Mail label, or post it back themselves. The portal replaced an older returns page.

The warehouse scans the parcel when it arrives, sees what should be inside and confirms or rejects it. Confirming refunds the customer in Shopify and puts the stock back. Customer service work from a list of every return, with its status and history.

The team make social content in the same software and schedule it to Instagram. For text graphics, someone writes a brief and Claude returns the copy for a batch of up to 14. A fit checker measures every piece of text, and a claims check makes sure each price, percentage and promise matches a Facts table the team maintains. A graphic that fails waits for a person to review it.

For lifestyle images, staff upload product photos and Google's Gemini model builds a new scene around them, with the product left as it is. Approved content is dragged onto a feed grid or a stories row, and the queue posts at the set times through the Instagram API.

The resizer takes the artwork from an order, fits it to the print shape for that phone model and case type, and sends a 300dpi print file to the workshop printers. Whoever is preparing personalised, one-off or reprint artwork for the press uses it.

Each phone model has a mask with its real size in millimetres. The match has to be exact: if the resizer isn't sure which mask applies, it picks none and offers suggestions. The print file carries the order number, the SKU, the mask name and whether the print is mirrored.

A run starts from reference photos, a written brief or researched trending ideas. Claude writes a brief for each design and Google's Gemini model renders it.

A person picks the designs worth keeping and approves each one's name, SKU, category and tags. A queue then creates the products in Shopify with their titles, descriptions, variants and mockup images.

Emails, contact form messages and Instagram messages arrive as tickets, with the customer's Shopify order beside each one. An AI assistant sorts every new ticket. It reads the live order and the knowledge base, then writes a summary, a suggested next step and a priority score for the person handling it.

A member of the team reads the ticket and replies. From the same screen they can refund items, send a free replacement, put the order on hold or create a single-use goodwill code. The assistant never carries out refunds, replacements or order changes, and automatic replies are off unless the team switches them on.

Customer service hours are down 70% and customer satisfaction has improved.

Case Club is Fun Cases' loyalty scheme, which we built as a custom Shopify app. Shoppers earn coins on every paid order, and for reviews, follows, birthdays and referring a friend. In their account they see their balance and cash coins in for a one-time discount code. Refunds and cancelled orders take the coins back.

Staff run the scheme from screens inside the Shopify admin: members, prizes, six kinds of campaign, scheduled popups, referrals and analytics. The app connects to Klaviyo and to Judge.me for product reviews. It replaced Smile.io, and balances from the old scheme were imported at launch.