Les Mailles de Mon Moulin
A complete online shop for a knitting pattern designer: physical and digital products, online courses, and an entire admin area tailored to her craft.
Where it started
One craftswoman, four businesses in one. Marie-Madeleine sells printed knitting patterns shipped by post, small-batch handmade pieces, PDF ebooks and online video courses. Four different selling models — stock, shipping, downloads, course access — that mainstream platforms force you to patch together with a pile of plugins and subscriptions.
We made the opposite choice: build everything around her. One site, one cart, one checkout. A customer orders a printed pattern and an ebook in the same cart: the pattern ships by post, the ebook lands by email with a secure download link. Automatically, without Marie-Madeleine lifting a finger.
And because a shop is much more than its storefront, most of the work went into the back office: an entire admin area, written for her.
What the shop sells
- Printed knitting patterns shipped by post, with stock and restock alerts
- Handmade pieces with variants (sizes, colours) and per-variant stock
- PDF ebooks delivered through secure, limited-use download links
- Online courses with modules, lessons, and resume-where-you-left-off
Customer side: a complete shop
Everything you expect from a real online shop — without the "powered by" in the footer.
Cart & secure payment
A single checkout: card payment, promo codes, shipping costs computed from the actual weight of the items.
Automatic delivery
Digital products delivered by email the second payment clears; parcel tracking with a progress timeline.
Customer area
Order history, ebook re-downloads, course access, profile — every customer finds everything in one place.
Online courses
A real course area: modules, lessons, saved progress. A full training platform, built into the shop.
Reviews, blog, newsletter
Moderated customer reviews, built-in blog, newsletter, automatic Instagram feed. The storefront stays alive effortlessly.
A home-made link page
Her Instagram link page, on her own site: sortable links, click stats, live mobile preview. One less subscription.
A pattern page: level, needles, yarn, sizes — the vocabulary of knitting, not of software.
The Instagram link page, hosted on her own site.
A customer area that gathers everything
Shipped pattern, handmade piece, ebook, course: the "All" tab gathers the four kinds of purchases, each with the action that matters. Parcels are tracked step by step, ebooks re-download (with a counter), courses resume where they left off.
Even withdrawal requests are self-service — no email to write.
Behind the scenes: a control room
It's the part you never see in portfolios — yet it's where Marie-Madeleine spends her time. Every screen below was designed and built specifically for her business. Real screenshots of the interface — demo data.
Every morning, the site says what to do
The dashboard opens on what matters: orders to ship today, monthly revenue, latest sales.
A "system health" section watches the technical side — email quotas, photo and PDF storage — to warn before anything breaks.
Orders in a guided queue
Orders land in a processing queue: one-click address copy, a "Ship" button that sends the tracking number to the customer, one-click refunds with a confirmation dialog.
Search, status filters, CSV export for bookkeeping.
Every customer, known by heart
Click a name and her panel opens: full history (orders, ebooks, courses), total spent, average basket, favourite products. With custom tags, private notes and reminders that surface on the dashboard.
Everything saves automatically, no button. A real little CRM — with no extra software.
Home-built, cookie-free analyticsGDPR
Visitors, page views, devices, sources: bespoke audience measurement, anonymous and cookie-free.
100% of visits counted, no consent banner needed for these stats, and no third-party subscription.
Edit the page… on the page
No dreary forms: Marie-Madeleine writes directly inside a faithful preview of her product page. Title, description, price, photos — everything edits in place and saves automatically.
Next to it, the business settings: printed stock, restock alert threshold, weight for shipping costs.
The whole site edits… by clicking on it
The real site shows up inside the editor; every outlined text edits in place, saves automatically, and the public site updates within seconds.
Dedicated modes for colours, fonts, sections and SEO — Marie-Madeleine evolves her storefront herself, without touching code.
A built-in knitting school
Marie-Madeleine wanted to sell online courses without subscribing to yet another platform. Her admin builds the course module by module, lesson by lesson — videos, PDFs, free preview — with a pre-publish checklist.
Buyers, revenue, completion rate: everything tracked in one place. And every customer resumes right where she stopped.
Promotions in two clicks
Percentage or fixed amount, scope (whole site or just patterns), usage limit, expiry date: the code is created in seconds and works immediately at checkout.
Wired to the payment system, usage counters update on their own.
Pre-chewed tax declarations
Every month, the site computes the revenue to declare, already split between goods and services as the official form requires, with estimated contributions.
Two "Copy this amount" buttons, a direct link to the tax portal, a declaration history. The chore becomes a copy-paste.
Every email, in her words
Order confirmation, shipping, newsletter welcome… every automatic email is laid out along the customer journey, and each one customises and test-sends in one click.
Even machine-generated messages speak with her voice.
And that's not all: shipping methods and rates, review moderation, blog writing, newsletter sending, Instagram feed, built-in help page… every corner of the business has its screen.
Everything under one roof
No tool lasagne, no stacking subscriptions: one site, designed as a whole — and respectful of its visitors.
One site that replaces everything
- A complete online shop, physical and digital
- A course platform with progress tracking
- An Instagram link page, with its own stats
- Privacy-friendly audience measurement
- A mini-CRM and a tax declaration assistant
Compliance & sobriety
- Anonymous, cookie-free stats, exempt from consent requirements
- A consent banner only for external audience measurement
- Self-service account and data deletion for customers
- Fast pages: server-side rendering, right-sized images
What if it had been done "the usual way"?
Turnkey platforms are perfectly fine, and that's not the point. The point is what you own at the end — and what you pay every month just to keep existing.
The classic stack
Covering the same ground with off-the-shelf tools would have meant assembling:
- A turnkey online shop, plus a premium theme
- A subscription-based course platform
- A paid service for the Instagram link page
- Extensions for reviews, newsletter, statistics…
- Dozens of euros in subscriptions every month, forever — and a generic interface designed for "everyone", meaning no one
The Obrentis way
One site, built for her craft:
- Shop, courses, link page, stats: everything is integrated
- An admin area in her language, in the vocabulary of knitting
- Features no platform offers, like the tax helper or the mini-CRM
- No third-party module subscriptions
- She owns the code and the data: she can leave, host elsewhere, keep evolving — nothing is locked in
a project in mind?
Describe your need in one sentence. We'll tell you if it's doable — and what it costs.