Wabi Sabi Gifts
Purchase and redemption as two separate objects
Wabi Sabi Gifts sells experiences instead of objects — boxing lessons, wine tastings, pasta workshops, photoshoots, flights. The platform is built around discovery: filter by province, recipient, category and price, with certificate activation, a corporate B2B channel and a bilingual EN/NL storefront.
Challenge
An experience is not a product with a stock count. It has a host, a location, a duration, a group size and a redemption date chosen by someone who is not the buyer — often six months after the purchase. Standard e-commerce carts cannot express any of that.
What we built
We split the purchase from the redemption: buying issues a gift certificate, activation binds it to a date and a host. The catalog is faceted across province, recipient, category and price, with every combination resolving to its own cacheable URL and facet counts served from cache.
Result
A bilingual EN/NL catalog covering 11 provinces and 11 experience categories, a working certificate activation flow that survives listing changes, and a separate B2B channel for corporate gifting and team building.
What it does
Every screen below is the live product, captured this week.
Faceted catalog
Discovery runs across four dimensions at once — province, recipient, category and price — and every combination resolves to its own cacheable URL.
- 11 provinces × 11 categories with price and recipient filters
- Cached facet counts so filtering stays instant
- Sorting and price ranges applied without a page reload
Category browsing
Each category is a curated shelf rather than a filter result: duration, group size, host and location are on the card before anyone clicks.
- Duration, group size and per-person pricing on every card
- Host and location shown before the detail page
- Add to basket directly from the category grid
Certificate lifecycle
Buying and redeeming are separate events, often months apart. The purchase issues a certificate; activation binds it to a date and a host.
- Purchase issues a transferable gift certificate
- Recipient activates against a date and a host
- Certificate survives listing changes on the host side
Gifting and B2B
The buyer is rarely the user, so navigation is organised by recipient — and the same catalog powers corporate gifting and team building.
- Recipient-first navigation: her, him, two, family, friends, group
- B2B track for corporate gifts and team building
- Host onboarding for new experience partners
Faceted browsing survives the phone: filters collapse into a sheet, the result grid keeps its imagery.
Under the hood
The stack, and the engineering decisions behind the build.
- Purchase and redemption split into two entities — a certificate can outlive the listing it was bought from.
- Four facet dimensions resolved into one query, with counts served from cache so filtering stays instant.
- Every facet combination resolves to its own cacheable URL rather than a query string.
- Host back office for onboarding independent experience partners without developer involvement.
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