It all started back in Feburary 2021 with a group email between HQ, uMarketingSuite and Vendr, instigated by Jeffrey at uMarketingSuite, with the title `Pitching the best idea of the year!` and ending in one simple question.

"Are you in 😁?"

What Jeffrey pitched was the development of an official swag store for Umbraco, something that has been asked for by the community for a long time, but also something that we could all use to showcase how well our collective products (Umbraco Cloud + Vendr + uMarketingSuite) work seamlesly together. 

Well, how could any of us say no to that? 

Scoping

As with any project, it started with a series of zoom calls to scope out what we would need from the site and to brainstorm ideas on how to inject Umbraco's personality into it. This was going to be for the community and so we wanted to ensure we built something that incorporated the same sense of fun and whimsy that the community is famous for.

We also broke up the responsibilities with Perplex / uMarketingSuite taking on the project management and design side of things, team Vendr implementing the site build and HQ providing the Cloud hosting and ongoing support / maintenance once the site was launched.

Design

The team at Perplex did an absolutely amazing job at designing the site. Proposing a swag shop brand identity as well as the site design as a whole. The site included lots of fun little eliments, including high stakes products you can't actually buy, and a touch of Umbraco's penchant for confetti cannons.

Build

For the build side of things, we started with a fresh Umbraco Cloud instance and installed the Vendr, Vendr Deploy and uMarketingSuite packages. Perplex were kind enough to supply the design as fully marked up HTML so for us it was a snap to drop them in to the site and to architect the document types around them. 

All we had to do then was to go through the HTML files and convert them into templates and sprinke in all the Vendr goodness, including displaying all the product/pricing details, setting up the checkout flow and the order email templates etc.

Launch

With the site built, it was just a matter of when to launch. Initlally it was planned that it would be part of Codegarden 2021, but a few product related delays and internal processes to work out, it ended up taking a little longer than expected.

But finally last week on UmbraCoffee the site was officially launched. 🚀🎉

What Next

The launch was really just phase one of the Swag store project. With the site launched, this is when uMarketingSuite will now be working with HQ to hone and tweak the site content and really showcase what uMarketingSuite is capable of. We'll also be continuting to support and work with HQ to keep upgrading and moving to the latest and greatest Vendr offerings.

It's been such a pleasure to be involved in this build and we are so unbeliavbly proud to have Vendr powering the official Umbraco swag store. It truly means a lot to us.

And with that, there is just one last thing for you to do: