deVOL Kitchens

deVOL's websites are as considered as its kitchens: generous photography, quiet typography, and pages that read more like a magazine than a shop. But underneath, both sites sat on Drupal 7, a platform that reached the end of its supported life in January 2025. Every new feature meant bespoke development, every update carried risk, and the brand was locked out of the tools modern retailers take for granted: a fast, trusted checkout, a large ecosystem of apps, and a platform that improves every month without a rebuild.

The brief was unusual. deVOL did not want a redesign. Its customers know and love the site, so the new one had to look and feel like the old one, page for page, across two countries, two currencies and two very large catalogues. And behind the pages sat real operations: tiles and flooring sold by area and by length, made-to-order lead times, sample packs, and a warehouse that needs every order line to be something it can pick.

One theme, two stores. We built one custom Shopify theme and checked it page by page against the live Drupal sites. Every UK improvement flows forward to the US store, and US-only changes stay in the US, so nothing is built twice and the two sites can never drift apart. The theme runs to over 200 page templates, and showrooms, projects and the journal are edited through around 100 structured fields rather than hard-coded pages.

A US launch, not a translation. For America we remapped the catalogue to the US store's own products, switched every measurement from metres to feet, and set up US tax, shipping and the product feed into deVOL's warehouse system, so the .com reads and trades as a native American store rather than a converted British one.

A custom Shopify app for bundles. deVOL's pick-your-own paint sample and candle sets were reaching the warehouse as a single item it couldn't pick, and no off-the-shelf bundle app could handle a set the customer builds themselves. We built a Shopify Function that splits each bundle into its separate products at checkout. It needs no hosting, and changing a bundle's price means editing one product.

Calculators that do the maths. Tile and flooring calculators turn a customer's measurements into whole packs, by area or by length, in metric or imperial, all driven by product data, so a new tile goes live without a developer. Flooring orders get a delivery date picker based on each product's lead time, and heavy accessories join the flooring delivery.

The details that make it trade. Sample ordering with limits deVOL sets itself, and optional add-ons, such as towel rails on a washstand, that arrive as real order lines ready to fulfil.

Both stores are live on Shopify, faithful to the original for returning customers, with more than 3,100 products and 1,600 journal articles carried across. Bundles now reach the warehouse as clean, pickable orders, customers buy the right number of tiles and boxes of flooring first time, and the content team edits showrooms, projects and the journal without waiting on a developer.

The launch followed five rounds of client testing, three in the UK and two in the US, and a warranty period after go-live. deVOL now has Shopify's checkout, its app ecosystem and a steady stream of new features, on a pair of websites that still look the way deVOL always has.