Rebuild · online store · design-it-yourself product
The Starting Point
RelayBatons.com has been engraving aluminum batons for schools, clubs and track teams since 2013, and every baton is personal: the team's colors, a name, a number, a school logo. In 2017 the owner wanted customers to enjoy that personal touch on the website itself. Until then a custom order was a conversation — the customer described the design, the shop drew a PDF mockup, and the two went back and forth, about three rounds on a typical order, until it looked exactly right. The craft was there; the goal was to let customers see it for themselves before they bought.
What We Did
We built a brand-new site with an online store, bulk pricing and fast hosting, and at launch gave it a text-based option picker. Customers liked it, and it showed us what they really wanted: to see the colors, the matte or glossy finish and the exact placement of their text. So shortly after launch we built a live 2D/3D baton customizer on top of the store. The customer now designs on screen — color per section, glossy or matte, text lines with a choice of fonts, a clip-art library, their own logo, and for teams a whole set of batons each engraved with a different name and number. The preview is drawn to the baton's exact measurements, so what they see is the production layout; when they are happy, it goes straight into the cart and they pay. Getting that right was configuration work as much as design work: real dimensions, color and finish options, engraving areas and pricing rules all went into the tool before the preview matched the physical product. We then looked after the site — updates, uptime, speed, search and track-season changes — from 2017 to 2023. In 2018 we found a server bottleneck slowing every page, moved the site to faster hosting, and an independent audit a month later scored server behavior 10/10. In 2025 we came back to refresh features and update the parts that had aged.
What Happened
By our count as webmaster: most custom orders now go from design to payment with no proof rounds at all, because the customer approves their own design on screen. Support and mockup emails dropped noticeably, orders reached the shop as ready-to-engrave layouts, and search traffic grew year on year while the site was in our care. The owner, in his published review of the work: “I gave him very rough ideas and hopes for my ecommerce websites. Roger presented me with 3 or 4 layouts, all looked great… Roger clearly understood what I was looking for and presented me with revisions that, each time, got us closer and closer to what we ended up going with.”
Proof you can check: as of September 2026, a Google search for “custom relay batons” returns relaybatons.com in four of the top ten results — the home page, a product page, the category page and the customizer itself — ahead of Amazon. The customizer is still live at relaybatons.com/baton-customizer.
What It Means for You
If your product is made to order, letting customers design it on screen turns the approval round into part of the fun — and sends you a ready-to-make layout with every order. A design-it-yourself tool is not only for big brands: it worked for a small engraving shop, and the same idea fits signage, printing, cakes, trophies, custom furniture or anything personalized. Start with our Online Store add-on and tell us at Discovery what your customers get to choose.
