We have a completely new website!

In the last 6 months we have been working behind the scenes on a pretty awesome project behind the scenes: We have been completely redesigned our website. Yes, really everything: the design, the navigation, the checkout process and also the underlying store system and the technology that controls everything.

This is what the new store looks like:

Why did we want a completely new store in the first place? 

There were several reasons: 

• The old store was over 10 years old. 10 years is half an eternity on the Internet. Among other things, access via smartphones is now much more important than it was 10 years ago and for a site to work really well on mobile, you have to adapt quite a lot. It's not just about the presentation of the product categories and products themselves, but also about the checkout: it has to be particularly convenient and super fast on mobile, because an order should be sent before the appointment arrives and you have to put your phone away.
• The technology behind the store was outdated. This was certainly noticeable at one point or another, but a lot of things in the background were simply no longer up to date. For example, we had to manually copy all the products into the email for our newsletter (images, text, etc.). Nowadays, however, this is better done via an interface and without manual effort.
• The old store was completely programmed by us. That used to be a great thing: we were able to implement many things earlier and better than others, but nowadays standard store systems have become so professionalized that they can do almost anything you want. And with significantly less effort than programming everything ourselves.

It felt like almost endless work

In total, 3 people (Bastian from Marketing, our programmer Helge and our boss Philipp) worked on the new store for over 6 months. Much of this was only possible with overtime, as of course the normal day-to-day business could not be left undone. Roughly speaking, 2000 hours of work went into the new store. It is really unbelievable how many details such a store requires: One example is the new categories. We have over 1600 products in our store and of course they have to be presented as well as possible on the website. To do this, we have redesigned our entire category system and also built a detailed filter system that allows you to filter each category by product type (clothing, watches, jewelry, etc.) or your interests (Marvel, computer science, science, etc.). We hope that this will make it even more fun to browse through our range, but that you will also be able to find a specific product quickly. 

We also think the countless images at the top of each category are very cool. For example, take a look at the cool pictures of the Marvel subcategories for example:

But these are just two examples of over 200 (!) images that we have created for the store. Click yourself through the categories, it's really fun! By the way: Yes, most of the images are of course AI-generated. Otherwise such a large quantity would not really have been possible. But since our lootbox artist Yuri Nenko is also a real AI artist, the vast majority of the images are much more than simple prompts.

I could go on forever about all the new things we've done (the lootbox subscriptions, our entire affiliate program, our merchant repurchase system, translations into 5 languages, etc, etc), but of course what's most important to us is what you think about the site. How do you like it? Are you getting on well with it? Is it fun to browse through the store? Please leave us your feedback in the comments below!

Missing things, troubleshooting and the future

Unfortunately, there are also some things that we were unable to transfer to the new store. For example, you will have to create new customer accounts. We have all the information about this in a FAQ.

We will be adding a few more functions over the next few months (wish list, for example). But right now we need a little break, we are all really exhausted from the project.

But what is still important: Do you find any errors on the site? Then please write a comment under this blog post so that we can fix them.