Bigbox became Unikdoft, a shop that does one thing properly

Bigbox decided to do one thing properly

The decision came first, and it was the client's. Unikdoft's About page says it plainly: Bigbox began as a marketplace for good products that shouldn't cost a fortune, and over the years it became clear that customers loved the perfumes most. "Så vi bestämde oss för att göra en enda sak, och göra den ordentligt." (So we decided to do one thing, and do it properly.)

But the old shop at bigbox.nu still looked like the marketplace it had been: a WordPress marketplace theme, English labels such as "Search for anything" around Swedish product copy, and sale badges on the product cards. My part was to carry the decision onto the web: the migration, the rebrand and the build, with an AI helper in the search box.

Keep the old name in view

The rename is told on the site itself, because the people who know this shop know it as Bigbox. A home-page section, "Från Bigbox till Unikdoft", sets the old BIGBOX logo beside "Nytt namn. Samma besatthet av doft." (New name. Same obsession with scent.), and its text begins "Du kanske känner oss som Bigbox" (you may know us as Bigbox), naming the shops in Kista Galleria and Jakobsbergs Centrum. The About page opens with the same line, "Från Bigbox till Unikdoft", and its image sets the old wordmark above the new one.

For this shop, being recognised mattered more than a clean break.

From discount urgency to calm Swedish

The storefront is in Swedish now, from the page language to the search box, and the tone moved from discount urgency to short, calm lines like "Doft. Kvalitet. Fickformat." (Scent. Quality. Pocket format.) The name reads as unik doft, unique scent, and the home page's headline says it again: "Unika dofter. Gjorda för fickan." (Unique scents. Made for the pocket.)

The wordmark is live text, Unikdoft over a small, letterspaced STOCKHOLM. The palette is a blush ground, a deep plum ink and one rose accent, and the category photography is black and white. Inter sets everything, self-hosted with an Arial fallback tuned to its measurements, so the text doesn't jump when the font arrives.

Pages in Astro, Shopify behind them

Why not a Shopify theme? Because I wanted the pages to arrive as finished HTML, with no script files on the home page, and Shopify to keep the parts a shop can't afford to get wrong: the products, the cart and the payment.

Astro builds the pages and Cloudflare serves them. The site has one island, Astro's word for an interactive component on an otherwise static page: the cart, written in Preact. It wakes when the browser is idle on product and collection pages, and talks to Shopify's Storefront API directly to create the cart and add, change and remove lines.

Checkout is the one page I left to Shopify, because its hosted checkout is the only supported way to take payment. It runs under Unikdoft's own domain.

Tidy the data, don't reinvent it. A Bigbox title like "NNN. Name – mini parfym för … – inspirerad av X*" became the name alone, with "Inspirerad av X*" underneath. The catalogue number moved to the end of the new Swedish address and stayed in the SKU, and the specifications buried in long product copy became four spec rows: Volym, Hållbarhet, Formula, Mått.

Sold by the name people already know

Bigbox already grouped its scents by the fashion house behind each original, through product tags. On Unikdoft that grouping has its own page, second in the menu: Inspirationer, "Våra egna tolkningar, sorterade efter originalen du känner igen" (our own interpretations, sorted by the originals you recognise), with a row of bestsellers and then 22 rows by house.

Disclose where the claim is made. Every card in the catalogue shows the shop's own name with "Inspirerad av" and the original beneath it, marked with an asterisk, and a line in the footer of every page says the named brands belong to their owners and that Unikdoft has no connection to them.

The trademark note used to be a "Notera" line at the end of each product description. Now every page carries a Transparens band that opens with "Våra dofter är egna tolkningar — inte originalen" (our scents are our own interpretations, not the originals). Not because the old note was wrong, but because a shop that describes its scents by famous names should say what it is not on every page.

One bottle keeps the rest simple. Every scent is 33 ml with the same specifications, so the product page leads with the name and the reference, and the collection of 221 scents filters as Dam, Herr and Unisex.

The same reference runs through the search box on the home page, which is also the shop's helper, Doftguiden. One input has three modes: Sök searches the range, Fråga takes a question or a half-formed idea, and Inspirerad av starts from an original the shopper already knows. I wrote up how Doftguiden loads, and how it fails in a separate Note.

The storefront is code, not a theme editor

A headless build, my own storefront in front of Shopify, mainly asks this of the shop: a new section or a change to the product page means a change to the Astro project and a new deploy, not something to drag into place in Shopify's admin. Shopify still holds the products and takes the payment; what the shop gives up is rearranging its own pages without a developer. I think that is the right trade here, because one bottle size means one product page, the same for all 221 scents.

Unikdoft is live at unikdoft.se. If you know the shops in Kista Galleria and Jakobsbergs Centrum as Bigbox, the scents are where you left them, under a new name.