Alder & Pine make furniture the slow way — one bench, two makers, a waiting list. Their old website was built the fast way, years ago, and it showed: a template shop that treated a dining table like a phone case, checkout steps that lost people, and photographs squeezed into frames that cropped off the joinery.
The rebuild began with a refusal: no product grids. A workshop that sells twelve pieces a year does not need a catalog interface; it needs a showroom. Each piece now gets a full page — the timber it came from, the maker’s notes, dimensions drawn properly, and one clear way to commission or buy. Nothing else competes for attention.
Underneath, the practical work mattered just as much. Deposits and balance payments happen in the shop, delivery is quoted per piece rather than flattened into a shipping table, and the waiting list is a simple form that writes straight to the makers’ inbox. The site does less than the old one, deliberately.
The first commission through the new site arrived eleven days after launch — a walnut table for a house in Bend, ordered by someone who told us the page “read like the workshop smells.” We will take that review over any conversion metric we have ever tracked.
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