The problem
Architectural door hardware is a configured product. A pull handle is not one SKU. It is a material, a profile, an overall length, a set of fixing centres, and a decision about whether you need a single handle or a matched pair.
Most hardware sites deal with that by not dealing with it. They show a photo, list a code, and point you at a contact form. The customer guesses at what they need, sends an email, and waits for someone to come back with a price. Some never send the email at all.
The job was to fix that: rebuild the store so a customer can put together the exact handle for their door and see the real price before it goes in the cart.
What got built
A Shopify store with a configurator sitting on top of it. The rebuild links four things that used to live in separate places: material, profile, size and price. Change one and the rest follow.
Pick Brushed 316 stainless. Pick the Straight Square profile, 25x25mm. Pick 625mm overall with 600mm fixing centres. Add a matched pair if the job calls for one. At every step you are looking at that exact configuration and its exact price. No POA. No quote request. No waiting on a reply.
Keeping it on Shopify was deliberate. Orders, payments and stock run on standard rails, and the configuration carries through to the cart and the order. What the customer built is what gets supplied.
The decisions that mattered
Real dimensions, not range names. 625mm overall with 600mm fixing centres tells the installer exactly where the holes go. That is the number the person drilling the door actually needs, so it sits on the product page instead of buried in a spec sheet.
316 stainless stated plainly. 316 is the marine grade, and in Auckland plenty of front doors sit within reach of salt air. Naming the grade beats hiding it behind a phrase like premium stainless.
Matched pairs as a proper option. Plenty of entrance doors take a handle on each face, fixed back to back. The configurator prices the pair correctly instead of making the customer double a single and hope.
And one price rule throughout: the number on screen is the number at checkout.
The 3D handle assembly
One piece of this job outlived it. To show the hardware properly, Nick built a 3D model of the handle and rendered its assembly as a 240-frame sequence.
That sequence now runs on the Tea Break Studio site. If you have watched a stainless handle put itself together over there, this is where it came from. It is a fair sample of how the whole job was approached: model the real product at the real dimensions and let the detail do the selling.
Where it landed
The store shipped and is live at entrancehandles.co.nz, selling configured 316 stainless hardware with the full spec and price shown before the cart.