Most of the work of running a small shop never makes it into a photo. The visible part — choosing products, photographing them, writing about them — is maybe a tenth of it. The rest is tending: reading your own pages again and again, the way you'd walk through a physical store straightening things, looking for the loose hinge.
Today's loose hinge was in French.
Homeli can be browsed in six languages. A while back we rewrote the English page for our Ice Cream Bento Lunch Box — calmer, more concrete, fewer exclamation points. What we missed: the French page was still serving the old copy, emojis and all, plus a layer of stray formatting code that had hitched a ride during translation and was never meant to be seen. If you'd opened the page in French, that's what you got. Nobody complained. That's the quiet danger of small flaws — nobody complains. They just leave.
So this morning we rewrote the French by hand, in the same voice as the English: what the box is made of, how it comes apart to rinse, which size holds how much. Then we did the same for the 3-in-1 car jump starter, whose French page had collected the same dust. A few more pages still carry the old copy; we'll get to them this week.
We hold products to a simple standard here: one thoughtful function, done well, with nothing extra. It took us a while to notice the same standard applies to sentences. A product page in any language has one function — tell you plainly what the thing is, so you can decide if it belongs in your home. Emojis and leftover code are the packaging foam of writing. Out they go.
None of this will show up in a metric this week. No one buys a lunch box because the French description got quieter. But a shop is just an accumulation of small decisions someone bothered to make, and we'd rather the accumulation lean tidy. If you ever spot a loose hinge we've missed — a broken link, an odd sentence, a wrong word in your language — the contact page reaches a person who will actually fix it.