Lianne.shop

The starting point

Lianne is a brand for yarn and knitting design with a loyal, growing community. An off-the-shelf store wouldn't have captured that: customers need guidance on which set fits their project and skill level, want to book courses and events – and want to feel part of a community.

The heart of it: the knitting-set configurator

The central in-house development – and unique in this form: right on the product page, customers put together their knitting set step by step.

First the mood ("natural & muted" or "bold & bright"), then the main colour – each with live yarn stock, so it's instantly clear whether there's enough wool for the project. Plus size and, optionally, the printed pattern. At the end, the automatic summary shows exactly what's in the set: yarn quantities, colour and pattern – a fully calculated package instead of loose parts.

The colour choice in particular is kept deliberately simple: instead of cryptic colour names, you pick the yarn straight from large photos of the real skeins – you see exactly how it looks and just tap it.

More than a shop

Around the configurator came more custom apps: a course & event booking system with live availability ("only 3 spots left", "sold out"), an AI customer service chat right in the store, and community features like the map "Knitted across all 95 postcode regions".

Not just the shop – the back office too

What matters most is what customers don't see: behind the store sits a complete management layer that I built myself too – custom apps right inside Shopify instead of a patchwork of third-party plugins.

In the set configurator app the team maintains over 100 sets – yarns, sizes, colour recommendations and prices – including an automatic check for which sets need attention right now. The Courses & Events app manages every date with its booking status and capacity at a glance. And the AI customer service "Frag Lisa" has its own back office for maintaining knowledge and answers.

The result is a single, coherent system – from the shop window to the stock logic: not just good-looking, but genuinely usable day to day.

The result

A shop becomes a platform: customers assemble their set precisely, book courses online and get help around the clock. I then rolled out the booking system as a standalone product for a second client as well – the artisan food maker "Der sizilianische Koch" (dersizilianischekoch.de).