Arlou & Rose
Rose Kuruvilla had never sold online before. We built the WooCommerce store for her Singapore gift box business, wrote its first SEO content, and have kept it running through five years of launches, holiday modes and a 2026 pause.
Arlou & Rose now sells from a WooCommerce store its founder runs herself, built in 2021 with our copy and content and kept on our care plan since.
What we were solving
Arlou & Rose makes gift boxes for expectant mums, new mums and babies. Rose Kuruvilla started it after trying to buy a gift for a pregnant friend and finding only baby hampers. Nothing in the market was for the mother. She named the business after her daughters, Aria and Louisa, and built the range around the stages of motherhood.
Rose was already a Chillybin client through her events company, but this was her first ecommerce business. She did not yet know how to photograph products, write product copy or process online orders.
The brief had a tension in it. Nobody else in Singapore was selling gifts for mums, so the site had to explain why a mum deserves one. Rose did not want to become a parenting publisher. The site had to educate just enough to make the sale, and feel special enough that a customer would be proud to send a box to a friend.
How we tackled it
Build the store and teach the trade at the same time
We built the store on WordPress and WooCommerce, with a layout led by product photography and short category menus. Rose supplied the front tile designs for the range. We wrote the copy, from the homepage headline ("Show her how much you care with beautiful gifts made for her") to the product descriptions.
Because Rose had not sold online before, the build ran alongside a working education: how to shoot products, how to write a description, how orders and payments move through WooCommerce, how to run a promotion without breaking the checkout. By launch she could manage the catalogue and run coupon banners herself.
Content that brings the right buyers in
The products solved a problem nobody was searching for by name. So the first blog posts targeted the searches people were making: the best customised gift box in Singapore, and gifts for a newborn baby in Singapore. Each post leads a buyer from a general search to the idea that the mum deserves a gift too, then to the range.
A care plan that follows the rhythm of a small business
Arlou & Rose joined our Website Care plan at launch and has stayed on it. Mobile optimisation and SEO fixes in 2022. Away-mode banners and coupon headers when Rose travels, switched on and off to her dates. A low stock banner in 2026. When Rose paused the store for a longer break in mid-2026, we built the notice and added a single email field so customers can ask to be told when it reopens.
What we delivered
Arlou & Rose now runs on the WooCommerce store Rose manages herself. Five years on, it is still on the same WordPress foundation, still on our care plan and still credited to Chillybin in the footer. We submitted it to the Singapore Website Awards in 2022.
The store is paused at the time of writing. The site says so plainly, with a return planned for later in 2026. The catalogue, the content and the search presence are all there waiting for it.
What we learned
For a first-time ecommerce owner, the handover matters as much as the build. Rose needed to understand the moving parts well enough to run the store without calling us every week. Teaching product photography and copywriting during the build was not scope creep. It was the point.
A care plan is for the quiet months as well as the busy ones. Away modes, pause notices and reopening lists are small jobs. They are the difference between a store that goes dark and one that tells its customers what is happening.
