Bahati Collective
South African furniture sold direct to American living rooms, on a custom Shopify build made years before Shopify was ready for one.
A Bahati furniture piece in a styled American interior — warm daylight, generous negative space to the left for a headline. Editorial rather than catalogue: the piece should look at home in the room it was exported to.
Save as /public/img/bahati-hero.webpIt started with a project of our own
Vibe Life Culture was a personal venture — a platform to digitalise fashion designers and their work, and give young designers somewhere to retail it on an integrated storefront. It is where we met Julian, one of Bahati’s co-founders, a fashion and interior designer. Nothing was being sold to anyone. We were building something in the same industry, and he was in it.
Two years, then an introduction
The relationship ran for two years before any of this existed. Julian then introduced us to Sarah, one of his business partners — a designer whose own specialism is wedding dresses — and the two of them had a plan: export South African furniture to the United States and sell it direct to the consumer, from a base in New York.
A single Bahati piece photographed as an object — accent chair or table, three-quarter view, warm neutral ground, raking light on the material. Product photography with an editorial register, not a catalogue cut-out.
Save as /public/img/bahati-piece.webpThe brief was fidelity, not invention
Sarah had already built the brand in detail. That is a different job from the one agencies usually want: the task was not to have a better idea, it was to bring an existing and well-formed vision to life without eroding it in the build. Every interface decision had to sit inside a brand identity that already had opinions.
The Bahati storefront on desktop — a category or product page showing the custom design at full width. Capture the real build; the point is that it does not look like a Shopify theme.
Save as /public/img/bahati-store.webpShopify, before Shopify could do this
This was technically the hard part, and it is hard for reasons that have since disappeared. Shopify was in its infancy as a design surface — the customisation a brand like this needed was not something the platform invited, and the hosting was the other half of the problem. Building a genuinely custom storefront meant working against the grain of the tooling rather than with it. The equivalent job today is an afternoon of theme configuration. It was not then.
What we delivered
A custom-designed and custom-developed Shopify store, consistent with the brand Sarah had built, capable of selling South African furniture to American customers. That was the brief and it is what shipped.
Why it is worth reading
Two things carry over. Cross-border retail is a logistics and payments problem wearing a website costume — the storefront is the easy half, which is a lesson we met again years later on Get Yachties. And a client who arrives with the brand already resolved is not a smaller engagement, it is a more exacting one: there is a right answer, and it is not yours.
- Design & development — futr
- Client — Bahati Collective
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