Bureau BrutalCustomers design their own monogram, and see it before they buy

Bureau Brutal sells phone cases, keyrings, bags and travel accessories that customers personalize with their initials, from classic gold and silver foil to hand-painted lettering in the brand's own colours.

Bureau Brutal was our fourth client ever. We started in 2019 with a single preview on a single product, and over the next four and a half years built and ran the personalization behind every launch, then moved the store onto a modern Shopify theme as it grew.

When the product is the monogram, shoppers want to see exactly what they will get. That is what every piece of this work was for.

A personalized product only sells if the shopper can picture the result. Every product needed a live preview showing the customer's own initials, in the style and colour they chose, on the exact product and phone model they selected.

The rules changed from product to product: two letters on a belt, three on a keyring, five on a phone case, nine in script. Paint lettering needed a white shadow layered under coloured type, which preview tools do not do out of the box. And with dozens of phone models in several colours, the catalog outgrew Shopify's 100-variant limit.

1. 01Set up live personalization on each product, with a 'Personalise it' step that shows the customer's initials as they type, matched to the chosen colour and phone model.
2. 02Built new lettering styles as the brand introduced them: classic foil, Paint Monogram with a two-layer shadow font, Paint Script, and seasonal fonts for campaigns, each with its own character limits and placement.
3. 03Restructured the catalog when it hit Shopify's variant limit: one product per phone model, grouped into collections, with SEO-friendly names and URLs.
4. 04Tested risky changes on a development store first, and timed launches to the brand's marketing emails.
5. 05Moved the store to a Shopify 2.0 theme with per-product templates, product videos, filters, and Dutch and French translations.