The Island Earth: A brand I built, a store I run, a proving ground I trust.
The Island Earth is Shaun Wilson Designs’ own print-on-demand brand: retro-cosmic mugs, magnets and small goods for dads, moms, dog people and lake people, made to order in Louisville. Shaun built the brand, designed and built the WooCommerce store, wired it to Printful, created the product art and photography, launched it across social, and runs it. It is where everything I offer clients gets tested against real customers first.
Or call (502) 387-1142Or text (502) 387-1142Shaun Wilson Designs, own brand
Louisville, Kentucky
Brand + WooCommerce + Printful
Brand, design, build, art, marketing, ops
Six hundred and thirty products, one voice, made one at a time.
Print-on-demand stores usually look like a catalogue somebody else designed. The Island Earth was built as a brand first: a retro-cosmic visual world, a dry sense of humour on every product, an editorial hub called Ground Control, and an Our Story page that reads like a real company, because it is one.
Underneath, it is a full WooCommerce build: 630 made-to-order products wired to Printful so an order is printed and shipped without anyone touching it, Google Shopping feeds, transactional email, a 664-URL sitemap and a storefront that holds together on a phone. It also had to be honest evidence. If I sell WooCommerce and caching to clients, my own store has to prove it under real orders.
Running my own store keeps me honest.
Every plugin choice, caching rule and marketing claim on this site was tested here first. Read the full WooCommerce case study.
Exact screens, not mockups.
These are direct browser captures of the live site at 1440 and 390 pixels. Nothing redrawn, nothing staged.
Page by page.
The work, piece by piece.
The brand
Name, retro-cosmic visual system, product humour, photography and packaging voice, all created in-house so the store has a personality rather than a template.
630-product WooCommerce catalogue
Rebuilt product by product and wired to Printful for print, pack and ship. Categories, variations and mockups organised so a 630-product store still feels browsable.
Ground Control and Our Story
An editorial hub for the brand’s writing and a proper brand story page, so the store has somewhere to be more than a shop.
Google Shopping and social launch
Merchant Center feeds for the catalogue, and a 60-post launch scheduled across Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest with tracked destinations.
Email and checkout plumbing
Cloudflare Email Routing for the domain, Brevo for transactional mail with DKIM, SPF and DMARC passing, and a checkout tuned for products that are all unique on demand.
Built by me, so optimised by me
Edge caching with the cart, checkout, account and cart-fragments endpoints kept out of the cache so no shopper sees another shopper’s basket, and a September 2026 move onto my dedicated server. It is fast because I look after it.
Built for every screen it will meet.
630
Made-to-order products in the catalogue
664
URLs in the live sitemap
60
Launch posts scheduled across Meta and Pinterest
0.2s
Typical cached page for a visitor
A real brand, a real store, and the proof behind every client promise.
The Island Earth gives Shaun Wilson Designs something most studios do not have: a live store of my own to test on. Product launches, feed rules, caching decisions, email deliverability and social automation all run here before they are recommended to a client.
And yes, it is fast. After the 2026 move to my dedicated server, origin response roughly halved on every page and cached pages reach visitors in about 0.2 seconds. That is a footnote, not the story: I built it, so of course I optimised it.
Built in Louisville, for Louisville and Southern Indiana.
Shaun Wilson Designs is a one-person web design and WordPress development studio in Louisville, Kentucky, working with businesses across Louisville and Southern Indiana: custom WordPress websites by a Louisville WordPress developer, custom WordPress plugins, WooCommerce stores, luxury web design for premium brands, website redesigns and WordPress recovery. See more of the work in the project portfolio.
Tell me what you are building.
One conversation, one builder, a clear next step. The person you brief is the person who does the work.
