wickandtallow.com
- Released
- 2025
- Role
- Front end & back end
- Client
- Wick & Tallow
- Type
- Full-stack
Wick & Tallow makes bespoke branded candles in the UK — a business whose whole proposition is that you design your own and they pour it. Over 20,000 customers. The site is not a shop with a customisation option; the configurator is the product.
The brief
A bespoke candle has six decisions in it: fragrance, vessel, vessel artwork, box colour, box artwork, quantity. Two of those are file uploads, one changes the price, and all of them have to be visible at once because the buyer is designing something and needs to see what they have so far.
Standard WooCommerce variations do not stretch to this. Uploaded artwork is not a variation, and a customer who cannot see their candle as they build it will not spend four hundred pounds on fifty of them.
What I built
I built the front end and the back end. The studio is a six-step builder with a live render of the candle beside it: pick a fragrance and the vessel updates, upload artwork and it appears on the glass, change the box and the preview follows.
Behind it the configuration has to survive into the order — the choices, the uploaded files and the quantity pricing all travel through to checkout so the team pours what was actually designed. Payment runs through Stripe on a checkout replacement rather than the WooCommerce default, because a bespoke order with uploads and a four-figure total deserves better than a stock cart page.
- 6
- Steps in the builder
- 20,000+
- Customers served
A candle that updates as you build it
Six steps down the right, a live render on the left. Fragrance, vessel, artwork, box, quantity — each choice redraws the candle, because someone spending four figures on fifty bespoke candles needs to see the thing rather than read a summary of it.
Uploads that survive to the order
Vessel and box artwork are customer file uploads, and they have to travel through the cart into the order intact. Getting a configured product with attached files through WooCommerce checkout is most of the work nobody sees.
Stripe on a replaced checkout
The default WooCommerce cart was swapped for a checkout built for this kind of order — bespoke, uploaded, quantity-priced — with Stripe behind it.
The fragrances, up front
The curated fragrance range is on the home page rather than inside the builder, so a first-time visitor knows what they are choosing between before they start choosing.
