The Brief
Shona runs Powerwincher, a Tasmanian manufacturer of electric winch handles for sailboats — engineered and built in Kettering, sold to serious cruisers and racers around the world. The site she came to me with had been put together on WordPress and did the visual side well: clean, considered, looked the part. The problem was everything underneath.
Three things weren’t working:
- The store sold in AUD only, which made every international visitor do mental currency conversion before deciding whether to buy
- There was no way to detect where a visitor was coming from and serve them prices in their currency automatically
- And the site itself had been getting slower as it grew, with intermittent crashes under load
Our Approach
The conversation actually started under pressure. Shona was at the Annapolis Boat Show — the biggest sailing trade event in the United States — when the site crashed completely. Show floor full of interested buyers, hundreds of “I’ll look that up when I get home” handshakes, and no working site to back any of it up.
I rebuilt it from scratch while they were still at the show.
The new build went after the three things they actually needed:
- Multi-currency at the architecture level, not bolted on top. Prices live as a single source of truth and convert based on the visitor’s location — AUD for Australian visitors, USD for the Annapolis crowd, EUR for European cruisers, and so on through the rest of the markets they sell into.
- IP-based geolocation detects the right currency on page load. No annoying popup, no “select your country” banner. The right price in the right currency, immediately. Manual override always available for anyone who wants to switch.
- A proper foundation underneath. Rebuilt on tighter infrastructure than the original WordPress install, with caching and server configuration that hold up under the kind of traffic spikes a boat show reliably produces.
It went live before they flew home.
The Outcome
Powerwincher came back from Annapolis with a site that did what they actually needed it to. International visitors land on prices that make sense, the site stays fast under load, and the people who picked up a brochure in Maryland can buy the moment they get home — in their own currency, through their own checkout flow.
The boat-show recovery is the dramatic version of the story, but the real win is the quieter one: a site that does its job in the background while Shona and the team get on with making winches.