A shop in three days

Then & Theory is the history brand I run under Alterra Editions. It makes short films and illustrated plates about the past: human origins, lost places, extinct animals, and how we know any of it. At the end of September it needed a home that could also sell things. The first commit went in at 1:16 in the morning on 28 September, and on the evening of 30 September the site was live on thenandtheory.com with a shop.

Not owning the hard parts

The biggest decision was not to run a store ourselves. Fourthwall prints, ships and takes payment, and the site talks to its storefront API straight from the browser, so there’s no server of ours in the middle. Hosting is Cloudflare Pages. That left us one job, which was the site.

The second decision was to build the shop before the shop existed. On day one the site ran against fake products, with a checkout that ended on a preview page, and by two in the morning the real connection had been tested end to end against a stand-in. When the Fourthwall store opened on day three, the site already knew how to talk to it.

Where the time went

Very little of it went on plumbing. The palette and type went through five versions in a single day, and the home page through six heroes, before we settled on a colour scheme and type modelled on National Geographic’s. Day two was the shop itself: a lookbook film, a clothing rail, plates that move, a quick-shop panel, and a museum section with galleries and halls. We also audited the site against WCAG 2.2 AA before launch.

Some of it didn’t work. Our first 3D clothing rail looked cheap, so we stopped modelling garments and hung the real product photos as cloth instead. A full-page grain texture cost four seconds on every scroll test, so it went. We tested on a laptop as well as a fast desktop, and the laptop caught problems the desktop hid.

What launched

The store opened with 20 products and reached 50 the same day: tees, long sleeves, hoodies, art prints, mugs and stickers. A custom Then & Theory box turned out not to be possible with on-demand printing, so that waits.

What three days doesn’t tell you

We haven’t published sales or traffic, so this letter can’t tell you whether the shop is a business yet. Some sections of the home page are still heavy on laptops, and we haven’t chosen a tool to email the people who signed up. The part I’d repeat is the order: hand printing, payment and shipping to someone who already does them, then test the risky connection first, before spending a day on how it looks.