One Girl, Two Chapters

Some client projects begin with a launch and end with a handoff. Our relationship with One Girl Cookies has been much more.

This Brooklyn bakery arrived bundled on our doorstep as a warm, gooey, and welcomed referral. They needed a new website that better reflected who they were.

One Girl Cookies has been a 3tone Digital client since 2023. What started as a website redesign has grown into an ongoing business partnership that now includes:

• custom development
• e-commerce
• cloud hosting
• monthly maintenance
• occasional tech support
• a yearly company-funded Christmas gift box of cookies

Over time, their business has grown, their websites have grown right along with it, and we have of course grown alongside them.

Chapter 1

Once upon a time, One Girl Cookies had a website that was slow, difficult to manage, and no longer helping the the way that it should have. Updating content was frustrating. Search engine optimization had not been properly addressed. Online ordering involved limitations, and event-related workflows required too much manual effort.

So our first major project together was a full website redesign and rebuild that helped visitors explore menus, learn about events, book hosted parties, and learn more about the company.

The first launch solved the immediate website problems and established a much better foundation. Instead of treating the website as a one-time project, we started a relationship that allowed the site to keep changing as their business changed.

Chapter 2

The original website used Shopify for online ordering and point-of-sale-related needs. That approach provided a starting point, but over time the restrictions became harder to ignore. As One Girl Cookies expanded its online offerings, the business needed much more control over how products were configured, how pickup orders were scheduled, how customer information was collected, and how order details reached the bakery team.

A cake isn’t just a product with a price. It has a specific size, flavor, filling, buttercream, decoration, inscription, pickup date, and preparation timeline. A box of cookies may be intended for local pickup, a gift, or national shipping.

And building that system required more than just adding WooCommerce, installing a couple premium subscription plugins, and calling it a day.

It required us to understand how One Girl Cookies actually operates, identify what standard e-commerce tools could handle, and develop custom solutions for everything that did not fit inside the standard box.

Standard platforms can work well when a business sells standard products. One Girl Cookies does not sell standard products. The rules that make sense inside a bakery do not always map neatly to the settings provided by an off-the-shelf e-commerce platform.

We moved the e-commerce experience into WordPress using WooCommerce, creating a more unified system with far more room for customization. The main website and online ordering experience now work together instead of feeling like completely separate parts of the business.

This migration wasn’t just about changing platforms just for the sake of changing platforms. It was about giving One Girl Cookies a system that could be shaped around their business instead of asking the business to reshape itself around software limitations.

Mmm, Custom WooCommerce Development

WooCommerce gave us a strong foundation, but the most important parts of this project came from the custom tools we built on top of it. We developed custom WordPress and WooCommerce plugins for specialized, business-centered tasks that generic plugins couldn’t handle properly.

These tools help translate the details a customer chooses online into useful information the bakery team can act on. Depending on the product and order, that can include cake inscriptions, flavor choices, decoration preferences, pickup scheduling, preparation requirements, and other product-specific information.

Some of the custom ecommerce work included:

• Capturing cake inscriptions: Customers can provide the message they want added to a cake while following the bakery’s product-specific rules and limits.
• Managing product options: Cakes and other customizable products can collect the selections needed to prepare the correct order.
• Scheduling pickups: Customers can select pickup details based on the bakery’s availability and required preparation time.
• Supporting different fulfillment needs: The store can distinguish between products intended for pickup, local ordering, gifting, or shipping.
• Improving order information: Important selections are carried through the cart, checkout, confirmation, and administrative order screens.
• Reducing manual interpretation: The bakery team receives clearer, more complete order details without having to chase customers for missing information.
• Creating room for future growth: The system can be extended as One Girl Cookies introduces new products, seasonal collections, events, and ordering requirements.

Digitizing the Bakery, Sort Of

A completed checkout is only one part of a successful order. The order information also has to reach the people responsible for preparing it.

WordPress websites can send email using a server’s default mail function, but default email delivery is not dependable enough for business-critical order notifications. Messages may be delayed, rejected, or filtered into spam. For a regular contact form, that is inconvenient. For a bakery order tied to a birthday, celebration, event, or scheduled pickup, it can become a serious operational problem.

We configured custom authenticated SMTP delivery for the website so transactional emails are sent through a more reliable mail system.

Because, you might not believe it, but when an order comes in, the One Girl Cookies team physically prints it out.

We weren’t interested in forcing a completely new workflow simply because a different process might appear more modern. Their printed orders are part of how the team organizes and fulfills work. Our job was to make that process more reliable. Sometimes it means connecting new technology to a trusted process and making the entire operation stronger.

They Owe Us Some Cupcakes

Moving an active e-commerce system requires lots of testing. One Girl Cookies depends on its website to accept real orders from real customers, so we obviously didn’t experiment on a live store.

We built and tested the new e-commerce experience in a staging environment where we configured WooCommerce, migrated content, developed plugins, tested product options, reviewed pickup rules, verified order details, and corrected issues before the changes reached customers.

Our staging process included testing areas such as:

• Product pages and product variations
• Required and optional product selections
• Cart behavior and order totals
• Checkout fields and validation
• Payment processing
• Pickup dates and preparation rules
• Customer confirmation emails
• Bakery order notifications
• Order details inside WordPress
• Mobile ordering
• Error handling and incomplete checkouts

Test cards and staging environments are essential, but they cannot reproduce every part of a real transaction. A simulated payment can tell us that the payment gateway responds correctly. It cannot fully confirm what happens when a real card is charged, a live order is created, an actual email travels through the mail system, the bakery prints the order, and someone prepares the product.

At some point, the only responsible thing left to do was buy some cupcakes.

Using the 3tone Digital company card, we placed real orders for at least eight cupcakes. We went through the same process a customer would use, selected actual products, entered real information, completed real payments, and monitored what happened at every step.

A Client We Grow Alongside

This project is about growth, but not only the kind that can be measured through page counts, products, dough, or order volume.

One Girl Cookies grew from needing a better website to needing a more capable digital operation. Their online presence now has to support an evolving product catalog, customized orders, events, local pickup, customer communication, and the internal processes that keep the bakery running.

Our role grew too. We began as the team redesigning a website. We became the team responsible for understanding how the business operates, developing specialized tools, maintaining the infrastructure, supporting e-commerce, solving problems, and helping plan what comes next..

Cookies and the best whoopie pies in Brooklyn, NY every Christmas.

Our favorite client relationships are those that are trusted, long-lasting, and involve cookies. One Girl Cookies has pushed us to think more deeply about e-commerce as an operational system. Their products have challenged us to build beyond standard options and generic solutions. Their team has trusted us with increasingly important parts of the business. In return, we have given them a digital platform that can keep adapting as their needs evolve.

Need an ecommerce system that works the way your business actually works? Talk to 3tone Digital about custom WordPress development, WooCommerce, hosting, maintenance, and long-term digital support.