That time we helped a custom engraving powerhouse finally get the performance, flexibility, and creative tooling they always needed.
What We Did
Custom Development
Custom Product Designer
Ecomm
Front End Development
SEO Implementation Support
Shopify Plus Migration
UI/UX
Overview
PlaqueMaker has spent decades building a reputation for beautifully crafted plaques, signs, awards, and gifts. Every order is made to spec, from materials and finishes to engraving, color, and mounting. Their customers return again and again because the experience is personal and the craftsmanship is consistent.
Behind the scenes, their ecommerce platform was holding them back. The site ran on NetSuite, and although the business logic was powerful, the storefront was slow, inflexible, and difficult to maintain. Their in house team and SEO partners felt the strain and so did their customers.
PlaqueMaker came to Wonderful looking for speed, better UX, and a customizer that could evolve along with their enormous and complex product catalog.
We helped them build all of that and more.
The Problem
PlaqueMaker built its reputation on craftsmanship. Every plaque, sign, and award is made to spec, with custom engraving, materials, mounting, and finishes. But their ecommerce platform could not keep up. The NetSuite storefront was slow and rigid, and customers felt it. Product pages lagged. The old designer struggled under the weight of thousands of product variations. Internal updates were complicated and risky.
Their SEO partner, Site Strategics, also needed a cleaner, more scalable way to publish educational content that actually connected to relevant products. PlaqueMaker had the expertise. They did not have the tools.
They needed a faster platform, a modern storefront, and a custom builder capable of handling real creative complexity without overwhelming customers or internal teams.
The Solution
A Shopify Plus foundation built for scale
Wonderful migrated PlaqueMaker to Shopify Plus and designed a modular theme flexible enough for their vast product catalog. Customers can now browse categories, compare products, and move into customization without friction.
Reusable components and metafields let PlaqueMaker update content and layout themselves. Celigo handles the NetSuite sync, while reviews, search, and analytics are integrated seamlessly. The storefront finally feels modern on the surface and manageable underneath.
A custom builder that feels like a creative tool
The centerpiece of the project is a fully custom design-builder tailored to PlaqueMaker’s unique needs. Instead of filling out a rigid form, customers can drag and drop text, upload images, add clipart, and manage layers directly on the canvas. Autosave and version history create a safe, accessible workflow, and the final preview mode makes the finished product feel polished and real.
A dynamic rules engine adapts to each product. Some allow color, others engraving only. Some accept uploaded images, others cannot. Mounting and backing logic varies widely. All of this is managed through Shopify metafields. The builder reads the settings and adjusts automatically, giving PlaqueMaker a sustainable system rather than a patchwork of exceptions.
We also partnered directly with Shopify to gain early access to expanded variant limits, which let PlaqueMaker support complex combinations without workarounds.
Content and SEO that actually connects to products
To support PlaqueMaker’s SEO roadmap, we worked hand in hand with Site Strategics to create a structured yet flexible content framework. Pillar guides and supporting articles are powered by metafields and designed to automatically link to relevant products and collections.
This gives their content team a way to publish valuable educational resources while helping customers discover the right products faster. It is easier to maintain, more helpful to users, and stronger from a search perspective.
The Results
PlaqueMaker now has an ecommerce experience that reflects the quality of their work. The Shopify Plus site is dramatically faster and far easier to maintain. The custom builder gives customers a creative, intuitive way to design products and gives PlaqueMaker the flexibility to evolve their catalog without engineering bottlenecks. Their SEO content can scale without adding friction.
This project did more than modernize the site. It gave PlaqueMaker a foundation built for long term growth.
Kind Words
“The customizer Wonderful built is a game changer. It gives our customers creative control and gives our team the freedom to evolve the catalog without rebuilding the entire system. This project did more than modernize our site. It set us up for real growth.”
