Community platform, redesign & system architecture · 2025
WOLOHO
WOLOHO stands for Work, Love & Home: three hand-curated letters a week, sent from Berlin to the world since 2013. Salina Gandji designed the new concept, Konstantin Haubrok gave it its execution and structure, and together with him we did the technical implementation and rebuilt the system underneath, so that placing an ad, paying for it, moderating it and sending it out runs on one stack the small and dedicated team can operate.
- Client
- WOLOHO GmbH, Berlin
- Our role
- System architecture and engineering, implemented with Konstantin Haubrok
- Year
- 2025
- Live
- woloho.com ↗
How it was realised
WOLOHO's team keeps the tool it knows, WordPress, but underneath it is now built like an application. Placing an ad, paying for it, moderating it and sending it out run on one system: ads that are free in some categories and paid in others go through one checkout, account credit and VAT handling for EU customers included, and the checkout no longer fails in the ways it used to. The site speaks German and English throughout.
Mail is the product, so mail got the care: every letter goes out through a provider the team can trust, failures are visible instead of silent, the newsletter is tied to the ads, and every letter can be read on the web as well as in the inbox.
Pay-what-you-want contributions, a coupon system and two-factor sign-in for the team round it off. The team moderates by hand; everything around that hand is automated.
European infrastructure and privacy got particular attention. WOLOHO is hosted and maintained by us on servers in Germany; the letters go out through Sweego, a French provider; payments run through the European entities of Stripe and PayPal. The visitor statistics are a self-hosted Matomo without cookies and with full IP anonymisation, every font and script comes from woloho.com itself, and because only technically necessary cookies are set, the site needs no cookie banner.
What it solved
- One checkout for ads that are free in some categories and paid in others, in two languages.
- Deliverability for a weekly letter to thousands of inboxes, with failures visible to the team instead of silent.
- Keeping the editorial, hand-curated workflow while removing the manual work around it.
- European infrastructure throughout: hosted in Germany, a French mail provider, self-hosted statistics without cookies, nothing loaded from third parties, no cookie banner.
The letter
A Workletter, read in the browser.
Every letter arrives as mail and stands on the web at the same time, with the same inserate, running numbers and contacts, filterable by category, city and start, and shareable one inserat at a time. The inserate shown here are invented; the real ones belong to the people who placed them.
Design
Up close.
Screens
In use.
