Stitches & Style:
+280% online sales in 60 days.

Stitches & Style is a Nairobi-based boutique fashion brand selling ready-to-wear and made-to-order pieces. By the time we met them they had a healthy Instagram audience, repeat customers, and a fundamental problem: the entire business was being run out of DMs and a Canva-designed PDF "catalogue" that customers screenshotted to confirm orders.

The problem

Three things were breaking, all at once:

• Order chaos. Customers picked items from a static PDF, DM'd a screenshot, and quoted a size. The boutique sometimes lost track of which DMs had been confirmed. Two staff members spent most of their workday in DMs alone.
• Size confusion. Without a database, "medium" meant different things on different items. Returns and exchanges spiked.
• Payment friction. Customers were told to "M-Pesa the till" and then send a screenshot. Receipt-matching was a manual exercise. Some orders were sent before payment confirmed; some never were because payment was actually still in transit.

The brief

"We want our website to do what our DMs are doing — but actually do it, with size data, with real-time stock, with M-Pesa at checkout. We don't want to retrain our customers on a new payment method. We don't want to lose the Instagram-driven feel."

What we built

A custom WooCommerce-based store with the integrations the boutique actually needed and nothing it didn't.

• WooCommerce store with product variations for size and colour, real-time stock, and proper SEO structure (because the brand was previously invisible to search).
• M-Pesa Daraja STK Push at checkout. Customer types their phone, hits Pay, gets the PIN prompt, confirms, sees an "order confirmed" screen — total time, <15 seconds. How STK Push works (full guide) →
• Automated WhatsApp order notifications to the boutique's operations phone the moment payment confirms. The team sees the order, the SKU, the size, and the customer's contact — no DM-hunting.
• Size guide modal on every product, with a per-product fit table. Returns from sizing dropped by an order of magnitude.
• Instagram feed embed on the homepage, so the brand's existing visual identity carried through.
• Inventory sync — items go out of stock automatically when the last one sells, no manual "sold out!" posts.

The architecture

WooCommerce on a managed Kenyan host, M-Pesa Daraja via a custom plugin (we'd rather control the integration than depend on a marketplace plugin that goes unmaintained), an HTTPS callback endpoint with idempotent handling and a 90-second reconciliation sweep, and a small Node webhook bridge for the WhatsApp notifications.

The timeline

• Week 1: SKU and image audit, brand assets handoff, Daraja sandbox build, theme customisation.
• Week 2: Full checkout flow built and tested in sandbox, WhatsApp notifications wired, size guides produced with the boutique team.
• Week 3: Daraja Go-Live submitted, production credentials swapped, smoke-tested with a KES 1 transaction, soft launch with a 20%-off launch promo for the existing Instagram following.

The result

Sixty days after launch:

• Online sales +280% vs the pre-launch baseline (taken from the boutique's manual sales log for the 60 days before launch).
• Average order value +18% — partly because of upsell modules ("complete the look"), partly because the size guide reduced the "buy two, return one" pattern.
• Order errors near zero — previously ~12 per week across mis-sized items, missed DMs, and unconfirmed payments.
• Customer service load dropped enough that one team member moved from DM triage to content production.
• Instagram kept growing because the store fed it, not the other way around — every product page links to its Instagram source.

What this build is worth, if you need something similar

A custom WooCommerce store with M-Pesa Daraja STK Push, automated WhatsApp notifications, and proper SEO structure typically runs KES 120,000–180,000 in Kenya, depending on the size of your catalogue and how clean your product imagery and SKU data are. Smaller boutiques can sometimes ship in 2 weeks; brands with 200+ SKUs and complex variant matrices take 4–6 weeks.

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