A suitcase the buyer designs before it is made

Globe-Trotter makes its cases in England, and the custom range is made to order: the buyer chooses the shell, the leather, the hardware, the lining and the initials, and the workshop builds that one case. The range sells online in the UK, the US and Japan, on Shopify.

Count the choices: 35 shell colours, 13 leathers on four separate parts, three hardware finishes, six linings, initials in five positions. No photograph shows the combination a buyer has in mind, and a list of options says nothing about how ivory leather sits on a navy shell. So the choice was made on trust, or in a store appointment. The question: how does a buyer in Japan or the US design the case they have in their head, see it, and send exactly that to a workshop in England?

Two things, on the store's own pages.

On the custom luggage page, eight case shapes each open a configurator: body colour, frame, hardware, leather on straps, guides, corners and handles separately, wheel housings, lining, webbing straps, trolley pipes, handle and its leather. Initials go on in up to three letters, five positions, three sizes, three typefaces and ten colours. The camera follows the buyer: open the interior and the case opens; choose the trolley and the handle extends. The price updates as options change, the build can be shared as a link or placed in the room in AR, and it goes into the Shopify cart as the exact specification the workshop receives.

On every standard case, a 3D explorer with hotspots explains the corners, handles, trolley, lining and the vulcanised fibreboard, shows the dimensions on the model, compares the three sizes side by side and sets the case in a furnished room.

Everything comes off one geometry. The range was modelled at true scale, so the size comparison, the AR placement and the configurator are the same model, and what the buyer measures is what the workshop ships.

Materials were matched to the physical leather and fibreboard swatches rather than to screen colours, so an ivory strap on a navy shell looks on screen the way it looks on the bench.

The configurator runs on the Threedium platform, as an application embedded in the Shopify theme on the store's own domain. It reads the product and the price from the store and writes the chosen options into the order, and it is localised for the UK, US and Japanese stores down to the order documents the workshop prints.

The configurator and the explorer are live on globe-trotter.com in all three markets, in support.