Craft subscription box and workshop platform · WooCommerce
Crafter
Crafter, which traded for years as The Crafter's Box, sells a monthly craft kit developed with a working artisan, plus the filmed workshop in which that artisan teaches it. Access to a workshop is permanent once earned, so what a member owns only ever grows.
Crafter Kids brings the format to families, a digital community plan sells the library without the box, and a real share of subscriptions arrive as gifts.
We worked with Mike at AssemblyWP for over 10 years. He built countless custom solutions for us, including a fully custom gifted subscription flow, advanced shop filtering, and extended WooCommerce Subscriptions and Membership functionality. He thinks strategically, communicates clearly, and genuinely cares about long-term success.
They came to us with subscription logic no off-the-shelf plugin covers, because the box is also a permanent claim on a video library. What a member can open depends on which subscription they hold, when it started, whether it was a gift, and whether the workshop is a relaunch of something filmed years earlier.
- WooCommerce
- Subscriptions
- Prepaid Subscriptions
- Memberships
- Product Bundles
- Custom entitlement layer
- ACF + Genesis
- Klaviyo
- AutomateWoo
- ShipStation
- Git + CI deploys
Built the entitlement layer.
A custom subscriptions plugin decides which workshops and patterns each member can open, keyed to their subscription type and start date rather than a blanket flag. It stayed in continuous development for the length of the engagement.
Made the galleries show what a member actually owns.
Workshop and pattern galleries filter by real access rather than listing everything and failing at the door, with search, per-subscription tabs, and specific empty-state messaging for new members who have not received a workshop yet.
Granted retroactive pattern access by start date.
When patterns launched as a content type, existing community subscribers were owed access to what came before. Instead of a blanket switch, we built a bulk tool that granted the correct back catalog based on each subscription's own start date.
Solved the relaunched workshop problem.
Popular workshops get re-run years later. A relaunch is a new product but the same content, so we link the two: buying the relaunch grants the original, and a reverse lookup grants access in the other direction. Nobody pays twice and nobody loses a workshop they already own.
Added a guided signup flow.
Joining runs as a six-step builder: subscription type, choose your workshop, prepay and save, customize the kit, add-ons, community. Every step loads without a page reload, the cart is assembled programmatically from whatever combination the member chose, and where people drop out is captured rather than guessed at.
Built the member self-service suite.
Box swap with one-per-cycle enforcement, skip a month against a calendar-aware cutoff, self-service pause and reactivate, and mid-flight frequency changes. All of it gated by the monthly contract calendar, with state reconciliation so skip, pause, swap, and renewal flags can never end up contradicting each other.
Made cancelling a conversation rather than a button.
A multi-step flow that captures the reason, then offers a discount or a downgrade to a digital-only plan before the cancellation confirms. The reason is logged against the subscription, so the pattern of why people leave is something the business can actually read.
Built gift subscriptions end to end.
Recipient email, scheduled delivery date, personal message, and a generated gift code, wired through checkout and into the funnel tooling, with redemption handling both new accounts and existing customers and creating the right plan on the other side. Their team can also mint gift codes in bulk from the admin, with an audit trail, instead of running fake checkouts.
Carried the gift data through a storage migration.
Gift fields lived in a storage location WooCommerce was moving away from, which would have orphaned them. We refactored the plugin onto the new order storage before the change could break gifting.
Kept the subscription mechanics honest.
Prepaid terms priced and labeled by number of boxes rather than plan name, shipping billed correctly on prepaid orders instead of at delivery, a monthly box swap cutoff, and a different skip cutoff for Crafter Kids.
Built the community and its sub-accounts.
A master account can create, manage, and remove sub-accounts for multi-seat access, all self-service including password resets. Community members redeem a credit each cycle by choosing a workshop from the archive and provisioning their own access to it.
Built a separate marketplace alongside the subscription.
A standalone shop for one-off kits, tools, and materials, with its own templates, faceted filtering by type and category, search, multiple sort modes, and load-more grids. It sells to the same members without cutting across the subscription flow.