Next project2026 — ongoing
Rent Siliguri
Local rental discovery that keeps properties visible and owner contact private.
Specialist commerce / 2026
Kawa Gloves
Building an e-commerce experience around how a specialist product is actually bought
Kawa Gloves brings premium Japanese baseball gloves to the US market. We designed and developed a custom commerce experience that makes specialist products easier to explore, supports customer journeys that don't fit a standard checkout, and gives the business purpose-built tools behind the storefront.
- Industry
- Sporting Goods / E-commerce
- Market
- United States & International
- Engagement
- End-to-end digital product
Strategy · UX/UI · Custom E-commerce · Business Software · Internationalization
Context
A product customers usually want to hold before they buy
Kawa Gloves specializes in Japanese-made baseball gloves for players looking for something beyond mass-market equipment.
That creates an unusual e-commerce challenge.
A baseball glove isn't chosen by appearance alone. Position, throwing hand, size, weight, leather and construction can all influence the decision. For a premium purchase, customers naturally want to understand those details before committing.
Kawa also serves customers looking for gloves beyond what's immediately available in the catalog, creating journeys that don't fit neatly into a conventional product page and checkout.
The digital experience needed to account for both.
Challenge
The challenge wasn't putting gloves online. It was helping people choose them.
On the surface, Kawa needed an e-commerce storefront.
The deeper challenge was translating a tactile, specialist buying experience to a screen.
A conventional product grid could display gloves, but it wouldn't necessarily help a player understand which glove was right for them. The experience needed to make product differences clearer without overwhelming the customer.
There was another layer behind that.
Not every Kawa purchase starts with an existing product and a fixed path to checkout. Some customers arrive with specific requirements that need to be handled differently.
And whatever we built had to remain practical for a small team to operate.
This meant treating the storefront, specialist customer journeys and business operations as parts of the same problem.
Approach
Keep what already works. Custom-build where the business is different.
We didn't want to rebuild established commerce functionality simply for the sake of making everything custom.
Instead, we looked at where conventional e-commerce worked well for Kawa and where the business needed something more specific.
Standard commerce could continue handling the familiar parts of buying online. The custom work was concentrated around the areas that make Kawa different: how customers discover specialist gloves, how products are presented, how non-standard requests begin, how international customers experience the store, and how the team manages those interactions behind the scenes.
The result is a system that feels purpose-built without creating unnecessary complexity for the business.
A considered purchase. More than one path.
01Product discovery
02Detailed exploration
Catalog purchase
Specialist enquiry
Internal operations
Experience
Explore a glove, not just a product page
Buying a premium glove online means replacing some of what the customer loses by not being able to hold it.
We designed product pages around inspection rather than simply presentation.
Customers can explore detailed imagery, use an interactive 360° view on supported products, and understand the specifications that distinguish one glove from another.
Instead of treating technical product information as secondary content, those details become part of the buying experience.
The goal was to make the screen work harder for a product that normally sells through touch and feel.
Product discovery built around baseball
Generic store filters weren't enough for a specialist catalog.
The shopping experience was structured around attributes that actually matter when choosing a glove, including factors such as position, throwing hand, size and leather.
That lets someone approach the catalog with intent:
“I'm looking for a glove that fits how I play.”
rather than:
“I'll scroll until something looks right.”
It sounds like a small distinction, but it changes the role of the storefront from displaying inventory to helping customers navigate it.
A different path when the catalog isn't enough
Not every customer is looking for something already available on a product page.
Kawa also needed a way to accommodate customers with more specific requirements without forcing them through a standard Add to Cart journey.
We created a dedicated customer experience for those requests, giving buyers a clear way to communicate what they're looking for and giving Kawa a structured way to take the conversation forward.
The complexity behind that process stays behind the scenes.
To the customer, it remains one coherent Kawa experience.
One storefront, three languages
Kawa's opportunity isn't limited to English-speaking customers.
The experience was built to support English, Spanish and Japanese, allowing the same brand, catalog and customer experience to serve different audiences without creating disconnected websites.
Localization was treated as part of the product experience rather than simply translating a few pages.
The result is one international storefront that can grow with the audience.
Beyond the Interface
The work didn't stop at what customers see
The storefront solved the customer-facing side of the problem, but running the business involved another set of needs.
We built private operational tools around Kawa's workflow so the team could manage important parts of the digital business from a more focused workspace.
That includes visibility into areas such as customer enquiries, custom requests, store activity and other day-to-day information relevant to running the operation.
The important part wasn't replacing every platform Kawa already used.
It was identifying where existing software stopped fitting the business and building the missing layer around it.
That's what turned the project from a storefront into a more complete business system.
Details That Mattered
Designed for mobile
Product exploration, detailed specifications, interactive imagery and customer enquiries all needed to remain comfortable on smaller screens rather than becoming simplified desktop experiences.
Meaningful product information
Specifications aren't buried as technical metadata. They're surfaced where they can help customers understand and compare products.
Specialist discovery
Filtering reflects how baseball gloves are actually selected rather than relying only on generic categories.
International by design
English, Spanish and Japanese experiences are part of the same storefront rather than separate websites maintained independently.
Simple for the operator
Customer-facing sophistication shouldn't translate into unnecessary complexity behind the scenes. The operational experience was designed with a small business team in mind.
Built around the existing business
Where established platforms already solved a problem well, they remained part of the system. Custom software was focused on the gaps specific to Kawa.
Result
From an online store to a connected commerce experience
Kawa didn't end up with a generic storefront wrapped around a specialist product.
The finished experience brings together several parts of the business:
Product discovery → Detailed exploration → Specialist enquiries → Commerce → Internal operations
Customers have a better way to understand products that would traditionally benefit from being experienced in person.
Customers with requirements outside the standard catalog have a dedicated path forward.
International visitors can experience the brand in multiple languages.
And behind the storefront, Kawa has purpose-built tools supporting the parts of the operation that don't fit neatly into off-the-shelf software.
The result is a digital experience shaped around the business rather than forcing the business to adapt to a template.
What We Delivered
- Strategy
- UX/UI Design
- Custom E-commerce
- Product Discovery
- Interactive Product Experience
- Custom Customer Journeys
- Shopify Integration
- Internal Business Tools
- Internationalization
- Mobile Experience
Takeaway
Sometimes the website isn't the whole problem
Kawa Gloves started as an e-commerce challenge, but solving it properly meant looking beyond individual pages and features.
The customer experience, specialist buying journey and internal operation all influence each other.
That's how we approach projects at Kode Pundit: understand how the business actually works, keep the parts that already work well, and build where existing software leaves a gap.
The deliverable might be a website, an internal tool, an integration or a combination of them.
The business problem decides.
Your business doesn't quite fit off-the-shelf software?
You don't necessarily need to replace everything. Sometimes the biggest opportunity is building the missing piece that makes the rest work better.
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