A Bilingual Storefront + Self-Serve Platform for a Handmade Candle Brand

Pretty Petal is a handmade decorative candle brand — flower-, bear-, and heart-shaped candles, hand-poured at home. When they came to me, they had no web presence beyond social media, and a few real problems holding the business back.

They needed a storefront that actually looked trustworthy, a way to capture customer inquiries and follow up with them automatically, the ability to add and manage their own products without paying a developer every time, and trackable marketing for their physical materials — business cards and packaging. And all of it had to funnel toward their real conversion goal: getting customers to order through Instagram DMs.

Two things: a public marketing site and a private admin platform behind it. The public site is a conversion-focused, fully bilingual (English/French) storefront — an animated hero with a primary call-to-action driving straight to Instagram, a 'meet the maker' story section, a product gallery that loads the full collection from the database, a contact/order form, and an SEO foundation (sitemap, metadata, Open Graph) so they can actually be found.

Behind it sits a password-protected admin dashboard where the owner runs everything themselves: a product manager to add, edit, and publish candles with image uploads (changes go live instantly, no code), a submissions inbox for customer inquiries, a QR-code generator with full scan tracking for their printed materials, and a live analytics dashboard. No developer required for day-to-day operations.

The piece that ties it all together is a single lead pipeline. Every contact — whether it comes from the website form or from an offline QR-code scan with the optional email-capture gate — flows into one place and automatically triggers a follow-up email sequence: an instant branded welcome, then a timed nurture drip (new collections, behind-the-scenes, special offers) that keeps Pretty Petal top-of-mind and steers people back to Instagram to order.

That's the difference between a website that just sits there and one that works. Online or offline, every lead gets nurtured the same way — with zero manual effort from the owner.

Pretty Petal now runs their entire online presence independently. They add new candles, read customer orders, generate trackable QR codes for packaging and business cards, capture emails offline, and watch real analytics — all from one dashboard, without ever touching code.

Most importantly, the site doesn't just capture leads — it nurtures them. One-time inquiries and offline QR scans get turned into a self-running marketing funnel that continuously points customers back toward their highest-converting channel. That's the system I build: not just a website, but the engine that sells behind it.