Covetear

The brief was two lines: "Product add on functionality. Work must reflect Covetear website design and use all the same fonts. Must be able to turn function on and off, as not all products require the add-on function."

Covetear, run by Gill Lawrence, is a piercing studio and sustainable fine jewellery label with retail stores and an online shop. Its cartilage and lobe earrings are sold the way a piercer fits them: a decorative front, and a separate post in the right length for the piercing. There are six post sizes.

The store needed a way to offer the post alongside the front on the product page, without it looking bolted on, and only on the products that needed it. It was a scoped job of the kind brands bring us when they hire a Shopify developer for a single feature.

The obvious fix was the wrong one for this business. Selling a whole earring as a single product would have meant new SKUs, kits and bundles that did not work with Covetear's inventory system or its retail stores, and six post sizes on every front made variants unworkable.

So the front and the post had to stay as separate products. That created the real problem, which only surfaced once the add-on went live: a shopper saw the price of the front, added a post, and watched the price go up. Within two weeks Gill had customer feedback calling it deceiving, and conversions had dropped.

The price also had to be consistent. A combined price on the product page and a front-only price on the collection page produced a second wave of emails from shoppers asking which one was right.

• 01 A Pair It With module that looks native A custom add-on block on the product page, built in Covetear's own fonts and styling, with a per-product switch so it only appears on earrings that take a post. Live within a week of the contract starting.
• 02 One price for the whole earring We reversed the pricing logic so the first price a shopper sees is front plus post. It only drops if they choose "None". Our first instinct was that an add-on should add to the price; the shopper data said otherwise, and Gill was right.
• 03 A forced choice, so nobody gets the wrong size The first combined-price version pre-selected the 4mm post, which would have meant wrong sizes and a pile of returns. We rebuilt it to keep the "Select one" prompt and a disabled cart until a post is chosen, while still showing the combined price.
• 04 Matching prices on collection pages Collection grids now show the same combined price as the product page. Built on a separate theme copy, previewed and approved by Gill, then published as the live theme.
• 05 A cleaner add-on box Removed the per-item price from inside the add-on dropdown so shoppers are not reading two prices at once, and kept the quantity.
• 06 Copy she can change herself After handover, we showed Gill exactly where in the theme code to edit the text beside "None", so small wording changes do not need a developer.