After Checkout.

That was someone who knew the business.

Someone who was working on the project.

And he couldn’t get to the end.

Now imagine a customer who’d just paid.

Custom orthotics have traditionally worked one way.

You press your feet into a foam impression box. You mail it back. A lab makes something from it.

Someone on the client’s side described how that usually goes.

This company did it differently.

You paid. Then you scanned your own feet with your phone, standing on a plain sheet of paper. The scan went to the lab, and the lab built a pair for your feet.

Faster. Simpler.

But only if the customer understood what to do at every step.

And at the start, almost none of those steps were easy to understand.

When Andrew joined the project, the company didn’t control its own website.

The site was hosted under a previous agency’s account. Early on, Andrew had to deliver some uncomfortable news.

Getting that back had to come first.

Then there was the bigger problem. The old site described the evaluation, the professional assessment some customers would get, in four different ways.

The answer lived in the owner’s head. It had never been written down.

Andrew’s view of what a page needed to do was simple, and he said it on the very first call.

Big brands with marketing departments can afford names that mean nothing until you’ve seen the ad a hundred times. A company this size couldn’t.

So when a product name came up that nobody could decode without an explanation, Andrew pushed back. He’d asked people outside the project what it meant to them, and the answers weren’t good. He recommended the team put a few options in front of real customers before deciding.

It wasn’t about taste.

It was about the second a buyer lands on the page.

The site had to make one promise clearly: this is made for your feet.

The owner, understandably, wanted to explain the engineering. The materials. The features that made the product better than anyone else’s.

He knew his craft, and he was proud of it.

Andrew held the line on where that detail belonged. The main page’s job was to make the process feel easy and personal. The deep detail could live on the individual product pages.

Then he asked the question.

Every page, Andrew explained, was built around a specific buyer and a specific path.

Andrew built the store on Shopify.

The products, the collection, the pages, the redirects from the old web addresses, the bundle discounts and the welcome codes were all created by script, so the store could be rebuilt or reused without starting over.

Along the way, he kept the decisions moving. On one long working call, the owner offered to send three or four photos for Andrew to choose from.

Andrew had already been sent plenty.

It was funny. It was also the whole philosophy of the project.

Every extra choice slowed everyone down. The team. And eventually, the customer.

Which brings us back to where this started.

The scan came after checkout. That was the moment the customer had already handed over their money, and was now alone with a phone, a sheet of paper and an app they’d never seen before.

When the team tested it, the problems were real. One tester couldn’t even get to the picture-taking part. Another got through the photos and then landed on a screen that seemed meant for someone else.

If people inside the business were getting lost, paying customers would too.

So Andrew built the guide.

A step-by-step walkthrough, forty slides long, using real screenshots of every screen the customer would see on their phone, in order. What paper to use. Where to stand. How to line up the shot. What to tap when the phone asks permission. What the finish looks like, so you know you’re done.

Alongside it, a narrated video of just under seven minutes that walks through the whole thing.

The guide was published at its own web address, ready to share with every customer.

The owner opened one of those long working calls by admitting he’d pushed until midnight to finish his part. Then he turned to Andrew.

A rebrand is usually thought of as a logo and a color palette.

This one was mostly about questions.

What is this? What am I buying? What happens after I pay? And how on earth do I scan my own feet?

The company already had a product it was proud of and a better way to make orthotics.

What it needed was for every step of that better way to be obvious to someone who’d never done it before.

Including the step that happens after checkout, when the customer is alone with their phone and a sheet of paper.

That’s where a sale either turns into a pair of orthotics, or stalls on a screen nobody explained.