A rental-first launch, new market.

A Dutch storefront, a new market, and a deadline.

Womy Sleeper is a baby-sleep brand that needed to reach a new market on a rental-first model. The first real constraint wasn't the rental engine at all — it was making a Dutch Shopify storefront usable in English for an international award and a trade fair, on a fixed deadline, without breaking the existing design.

We scoped localisation as the multi-surface problem it is: "translate the site" is never one job. Theme strings, app embeds, popups, blogs, button labels and lifecycle emails can each have separate ownership, and any one of them left in the source language quietly breaks the launch. The real constraint was the full surface, not a translation file.

A rental launch is a system, not a feature.

Shopify sells; it doesn't rent. So we shaped the launch as one linked system and built it in waves, each tied to a real moment — the fair, the award, the soft launch. First, the localisation itself: diagnosing why custom theme fields weren't reaching Langify, adjusting Shopify theme strings so more content became translatable, then handling the content through CSV translation exports and imports across the switcher, blogs, buttons, popups and Klaviyo-owned surfaces — including pinpointing a Klaviyo account mismatch that was silently blocking popup translation.

Around the launch moments sat the event surfaces and proof work: a QR-driven, noindex lead-capture path wired to Klaviyo for the fair, plus the homepage video ordering, media-page content, product-gallery proof, and the user-manual and return-instruction pages a physical, rentable product has to ship with.

Then the rent-first product path itself — a page built to rent rather than sell, with size and rental-duration options, sensible defaults, and the multilingual copy a rental option needs to be legible to a first buyer — and the launch plumbing underneath it: Shopify payment setup and testing (Mollie and iDEAL), email sender and domain authentication, shipping and returns through MyParcel with PostNL and DPD, AddressHero to catch the missing house-number data that checkout lets through and fulfilment chokes on, plus FAQ, search, Shopify Inbox chat and the legal-terms handling a checkout needs.

The rental engine kept moving under us.

A rental model doesn't settle on launch day — it surfaces a messy post-launch reality, and the loop is built to absorb it. The rental engine moved through Product Rentals Pro and Seal Subscriptions toward Firmhouse, with the live product route, the self-service centre and return notifications configured around it.

Each turn surfaced the next constraint to own: app-owned product pages that override Shopify-native price and button behaviour, subscription notification limits, return reminders before a rental expires, discount behaviour, product-route ownership, and the SEO and schema questions that appear when an app, not Shopify, owns the price. We also put the theme on a Git-backed workflow so preview, rollback and history stayed safe while all of this was in flux.