Have you ever worked on a website for a friend of family member? See… My first client was my sister. She wanted to start a new clothing brand called “The Sossur Brand” (It’s pronounced “So Sure”). And since she knew I was in the Web Development and Design program at my school. She asked me if I could work on making her website. That was around late November. It is now mid-May. The website is, what I’d like to say, done. Not sure how she feels, though. But it went through some tinkering and stuff. There are things that I could do better with it. In this blog, I’ll go over the timeframe of the whole project of mine.
November-December (The Plan Making)
She approaches me while I get home from school. She first tells me about the whole brand and what it stands for. To keep it simple, it’s luxury… meets streetwear… It’s more clever than you think. She wants it done by February. I say ok, and she gives me the Shopify login. She’s more prepared for this than I figured. She had the color code ready, the logo, everything down. She had ideas for potential clothing and shared them with me. So now I have it, I have the Shopify she uses, and the “official” logo.
Color Code and the “Official” “Sossur Brand” Logo, respectively.
January
The remaking of the logo
I’ll say January was a bit tricky when it came to communicating and working on the website. I wanted to import the logo in as an SVG since it was standard for that kind of logo. However, closely inspecting the ACTUAL logo itself. It’s AI-generated. Let me break it down for you.
| There’s one OBVIOUS trait that this has to be AI-generated. Look at the “Registered” symbol, actually look at the TWO “Registered symbols. IT DOESN’T EVEN LOOK LIKE AN R. AND THE ONE UNDER THAT “r” LOOKS LIKE A DOT. A couple of other things to note, look at the 2 lowercase “s”, they’re NOT the same. At first glance of the logo, it seems legitimate. But looking closely, it is quite easy to see that it’s AI. So, to do anything designable, I had to remake the logo. |
So here’s what I made
| So here’s what I came up with. It was made in Canva. The font used was Bugaki. I decided to use the font for ALL of the words in the logo. I replicated how it looked, too. At first, I figured to move the “BRAND” into the line like how “THE” is positioned, but my sister said otherwise. And I put an ACTUAL “Registered” icon on the logo itself (Assuming my sister put a Register on her business). The “Sossur” is now all uppercased and is consistent with the other elements of the logo. When I gave my sister the final revision, she gave me the thumbs-up to use it on the website. |  |
The website building (start of communication issues)
Now with the logo out of the way, I went to work on the website itself, but I was limited because my sister had me on her Shopify starter plan. This did not allow me to customize the website itself. It only allowed me to change the colors and logo. And I was limited to when I could work on this because I was originally working on it at school, when I had free time to work on it.
BUT…
But the IT at my school was basically FIGHTING ME on whether I can use Shopify at school. They blocked the ability to edit the website there, even though I was in Web Development and Design, which the whole premise of that program is WORKING ON WEBSITES!!
So I ask her,
And she responds with,
She didn’t pay for it the next day.
So the next day I’m asking what domains she wanted to pay for, in case she didn’t want to use the regular Shopify link it was assigned to.
I’m not going to list all of the images I sent to her.
Went a couple of days, trying to stay optimistic and waiting for her to switch to Basic (So I can start WORKING ON IT). I had to ask again.
 | I asked again since I was free and she wanted it DONE by February. I don’t think whatever she tried went through. So she had to go in and pay for Shopify Basic. So I could NOW work on this website like I was asked to in the first place. |
| This is what the landing page looks like. I wish I had more time and more resources to work on it. But bad communication got in the way. I don’t even think she’s using it. My last text was asking her what the products should be. I never got a response back. |  |
Conclusion
So in conclusion, there’s that journey, I wish I had more to say but really, it just came to poor communication. I tried to get as much feedback as to what I was doing, but she never really showed up. She came up to me one time in April, asking about the website. Saying she paid for it and thought nothing got done. But this is a learning experience, and I learned something about this. I want to try and work on my communication skills and make time to do this because I barely had any time to work on it. But that’s my journey, try not to be like me, working on these types of things.
However, with that being said. She’s not working to manufacturing clothing and putting them on for sale on the website, I have a set myself actually. REALLY BIG THOUGH!!! but hilariously comfortable.
If you would like to view the website I’ll provide a link here.
Thank you for reading my blog. If you want any other types of blogs like these, check out my others, such as E-Commerce Tactics To Improve A/B Results & Sales in 2024. Which helped out my case. Thank you for reading, and I’ll see you next time!