corkandchroma.com.au
Built the booking engine behind Sydney's favourite sip-and-paint nights, so punters can reserve a seat and a canvas without a phone call.
B.J. wanted out of Adobe Business Catalyst and full control over how sessions were sold online. The catch: Cork & Chroma doesn't sell products, they sell an evening out. Booking a painting class isn't the same as buying a t-shirt resulting in a custom solution built from the ground up...inside and out.
Our first instinct was to build around an event management framework. Once the full requirements list landed, we changed course: a custom WooCommerce build made from scratch, designed to sell bookable sessions instead of boxes. Each class became its own product, but nothing about it looked or worked like a standard online store.
Adobe Business Catalyst had Cork & Chroma boxed in, with no real say over how the site looked, worked or grew. We rebuilt the whole thing on WordPress, which meant starting from zero on the backend but ending up with something they actually owned.
Every part of the site, from content to design to the store itself, is now something they can shape without waiting on a platform's limitations.
Most eCommerce platforms assume you're shipping a box. Cork & Chroma sells a night out, so we built their WooCommerce store from the ground up around bookings instead of stock levels.
Each session runs as its own product with its own date, time and seat count, without dragging along all the packaging and shipping logic a normal store carries
A sold-out session that still looks bookable is a fast way to annoy a customer. We built smart session management that pulls a class from view the moment it's full, so there's no gap between what the site shows and what's actually available.
Buttons and calls to action shift in real time as seats fill, so people always know exactly where they stand before they click book.
Buying someone a paint night is a popular gift, but there's no physical item to hand over.
We built a custom store voucher system into checkout so gift purchases work like any other product, generate a redeemable code, and slot straight into the booking flow when the recipient is ready to use it.
Running sessions across multiple locations means a lot of moving parts to keep straight.
We paired custom backend order reports with integrated payment processing, so bookings, payments and session details all live in the one place instead of being pieced together from separate systems.
Studio 313 was able to design us a website that is easy to use, trim and svelte: no clutter, no superfluous buttons, just well-developed ideas. The entire experience was wonderful, exactly how you would want it to be.B.J. Wall | Cork & Chroma
The design needed to feel like Cork & Chroma — loose, artistic, a bit cheeky — so rather than build inside their existing branding, we pushed it further. Behind the scenes, sessions that filled up were pulled from view automatically.
No overbooking, no confused customers, just calls to action that update as seats disappear.
Breaking the WooCommerce Mould With A Custom Design For Art Sessions
Every art session got its own custom-built page, redesigned from the ground up instead of running on a standard WooCommerce product template.
Details were front and centre so people knew exactly what they were booking, and getting from browsing to booked took a few clicks, not a form and a phone call.
Sydney based web design and WordPress development since 2008