Opening a storefront in Japan

Läderach was opening in Japan, which is a lot more than translating a website. A market needs its own store views, its own navigation, its own content, its own URLs, and a way to go live without the other markets noticing. It also needed a Japanese-language store and a Japanese-English one, which are different audiences reading the same catalogue.

I built the JP and JP-EN store views and the machinery underneath them: main menus per store, content assigned and unassigned per store so English pages did not leak into the Japanese one, translations through to breadcrumbs and notification templates, a default country per store view in the address forms, and category SEO blocks for the new locale. URL rewrites and store creation went in as data patches, so the launch was repeatable across environments rather than hand-configured in an admin panel. A coming-soon page held the storefront before the launch date.

Japan launched as its own market on the same platform, with the setup captured in code rather than in someone's memory of what they clicked.