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 — a constant in functions.php bumped on every CSS or JS change. Without it, half the customers see the store with stale styles for hours.
• rsync deploys from GitHub Actions, syncing only the theme directory. No plugins, no uploads, no database: CI can’t touch what it shouldn’t.

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
• Deploy pipeline with a protected branch and PR review

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.

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.