fleur-moerenhout.com

Fleur Moerenhout is a bespoke e-commerce platform built for a Dutch artist and designer specializing in original paintings, textiles, and artisan paper goods. The project required a refined online presence that would reflect the handcrafted, poetic quality of Fleur's work while providing a fully functional storefront capable of handling international orders across Europe and beyond.

The platform was developed on Ruby on Rails with Solidus as the commerce engine, customized extensively to meet the unique needs of an independent artist. A tailored shipping system was engineered using PostNL's 2026 rate structure, with a custom calculator that automatically determines shipping costs based on whether a customer's cart contains small items like prints and cards or larger original artworks requiring insured parcel delivery — all across four distinct postal zones covering the Netherlands, nearby Europe, the rest of Europe, and worldwide.

The storefront features a fully responsive design built with Tailwind CSS, including a dynamic homepage with curated product carousels, an animated brand story section, a commission showcase slider, and a rotating announcement bar for promotional messaging. Every text element on the site is editable through a custom content block system in the admin panel, giving the client full control over copy changes without developer involvement. An integrated newsletter system with automated welcome emails delivers discount coupon codes to new subscribers, driving first-purchase conversion.

On the administrative side, a comprehensive Solidus Admin interface was built with custom controllers and components for managing shipping methods, content blocks, newsletter subscriptions, and contact messages. A periodic activity reporting system automatically emails the shop owner with summaries of new orders, messages, and subscriptions. The platform also includes wishlist functionality, a honeypot-based spam filter with email blacklisting for the contact form, and full tax configuration for Dutch BTW rates.

The project was deployed on AWS with SES email delivery, S3 asset storage, and a MaxMind GeoIP database for analytics. It stands as a complete end-to-end solution — from product photography presentation to international checkout — purpose-built for an artist who needed her digital storefront to feel as intentional and beautiful as the art it sells.