Lodge Milano & Co

Context

A multi-brand fashion house selling authenticated luxury clothing and watches, with a catalogue synced from a wholesale supplier. Nearly 5,000 SKUs whose stock and pricing change on their own, in two languages, charging in dollars.

The brief carried an obvious tension: the catalogue is huge and automated, but the brand is luxury. A store with 4,870 products tends to look like a warehouse. This one had to look like a boutique.

Approach

• Hand-written classic PHP theme, no FSE and no build step. In a store that takes real money, every layer of tooling is one more thing that can break during a Friday deploy. The CSS is flat and versioned; it caches and that’s that.
• Editorial hierarchy over a mass catalogue — the hero is a single full-bleed image, navigation splits women, men and watches, and listings are given room. Here luxury is the whitespace, not the ornament.
• Polylang for English and Spanish with their own URLs, English as default given the target market.
• Theme-version cache busting, bumped on every CSS or JS change. Without it, half the customers see the store with stale styles for hours.

What I built

• Complete WooCommerce theme: catalogue, product page, cart and checkout
• Wholesale supplier catalogue integration with stock sync
• Bilingual EN/ES with a switcher and localised routes
• Live payment gateway charging in dollars
• Compliant cookie banner and legal copy

Outcome

It’s live and taking payments. The part of this project I find most interesting isn’t visible: the decision not to introduce a build step. A year from now, anyone can clone the repo, edit a CSS file and deploy without installing anything or fighting a Node version that no longer exists.

That decision paid for itself when the house opened in Hong Kong. The theme was forked for lodgemilanoandco.hk, live since July 2026, with Traditional Chinese as the canonical language and English under /en/. With no build step, porting the store to another market and another writing system was template and typography work, not rebuilding a toolchain.

A note on this work

Built at Xpandex, where I run the full cycle: design, development, performance, accessibility, technical SEO and deployment. Product catalogue and photography are supplied by the wholesale partner.