New website

Today marks something of a milestone for Toshi Straps. After months of work — and almost nineteen years since I first put my straps online — I’m proud to launch this brand‑new website. It’s hard to put into words just how relieved I am to finally get this new site finished, how much time & effort has gone into it, or how much it means to finally share it, but here it is.

Looking back

My first website went live in 2007. I built it myself with HTML for Dummies open beside me, line by line, hoping I’d typed everything correctly. It was very basic, showcasing the 10 or so leathers I had at that time, and although it allowed customers to place an order it couldn’t take their payments, so every order meant emailing a customer their bill and waiting for payment to arrive. It was very simple, and in truth it barely held itself together, but it was mine — it was the first website I had ever built and it was the first time my work had a home online. I managed to find an screenshot of the homepage, but looking at it now I can't understand why I ever thought that old logo worked!

In 2014 I rebuilt everything on WordPress. That was an education, it took a long time, but when it was finished it felt like a huge leap forward: proper product pages, online payments for the first time, a more modern look. It has served me well for a long time, but over the last couple of years, the cracks began to show. I've found myself spending more and more time fixing things, updating plugins, patching problems, and as a result there has been less time to do what I love — making straps. Eventually, it became clear that something had to change.

Choosing Shopify

At the start of this year I began looking at options for a new site. Shopify wasn’t an easy decision. It’s a very different environment to Wordpress, with its own rules and limitations, and I didn’t understand any of it at the beginning. But importantly it offered something I desperately needed: stability. A platform built for e-commerce, with better performance, better security, and fewer surprises.

It wasn’t the easiest path, but I believe it was the right one.

The work behind the scenes

I honestly don’t want to think about how many hours have gone into this rebuild. Some days it felt like all I did was struggle to make Shopify behave itself. The product photography alone was a mountain to climb. I realised that around forty leathers had to be re‑photographed from scratch — which meant making forty new straps purely for photography before I even started. Around 80 hours went into that alone!

Other days were spent wrestling with code, trying to recreate things that were simple in WordPress but maddeningly difficult in Shopify. I knew what I wanted to achieve, but often Shopify fought me at every step. The FAQ and gallery pages alone took weeks. All through the process there have been moments of real frustration, things that refused to work, and more than a few sleepless nights thinking through problems.

But slowly, piece by piece, it came together. And now that it’s finished, I’m genuinely proud of it. This feels like the most polished, stable, and thoughtful version of Toshi Straps I’ve ever built.

A couple of compromises

The gallery has been the hardest compromise. My old site had over 1,200 images showcasing my work. Shopify has a hard limit of 250 images, and despite trying every workaround I could think of over a two‑week period, nothing would allow me to bring the full gallery across.

For now, the site launches with a curated selection of 250 of my favourite images. I still hope to restore the full gallery one day, but I can’t promise anything yet except that I will continue to try to find a solution.

The second compromise is customer accounts. There was no way to carry over order history or account details from WordPress to Shopify, so everyone arrives here without an account initially. You don’t need an account to place an order — guest checkout works exactly as before — but creating one will make future orders quicker and easier. Your details will be saved securely, checkout will be faster, you will be able to track current orders, and you will be able to reorder straps without re‑entering everything. It’s optional, but it does make life easier.

And if you ever need a record of your past orders with me from before this new site, I have them — just contact me.

A final word

I believe everything is working as it should, but if you spot anything odd or something doesn’t behave the way you expect, please let me know. I’m hoping for a smooth transition, but there may be a few things I haven’t caught yet. If you see anything - get in touch.

This new site represents a huge leap forward from that simple HTML page I built nearly twenty years ago. It’s taken a lot out of me, but it’s also reminded me how much I care about what I do (and how much happier I am making watch straps than writing code!). I’m proud of this version of Toshi Straps, and I’m grateful to everyone who has supported me along the way.