The Well at Nine Yards
A Johannesburg wellness brand's bookable Shopify experience: a pathway quiz, live class calendar, and memberships.
- Client
- The Well at Nine Yards
- Location
- Johannesburg, South Africa
- What we built
- Brand site · booking integration · memberships
- Stack
- Bespoke Shopify theme · Rezerv
- Live site
- thewell.africa (opens in a new tab)
The brief
The Well is a Johannesburg wellness center with a clear point of view: urban wellbeing, done well. Deliberately not spa, not luxury, but a grounded place to recalibrate.
It needed a brand site that carried that voice and a bookable experience spanning memberships, classes, events and treatments, with scheduling in its booking platform, Rezerv, and the brand on Shopify. Most visitors arrive on a phone, so every page was designed for the small screen first.
- 86 custom theme sections the bespoke “Oasis” Shopify theme
- 38 individual pages classes, therapies, recovery
- 4 membership tiers Origin · Stream · Well · Source
Source: thewell.africa and the site’s Shopify theme, September 2026.
From how you feel to what you book
A wellness catalog is overwhelming when you don’t know where to start. The Well Guide asks three short questions and matches you to one of three pathways: Reset, Revitalise or Deepen. We built it to educate, not sell, and then made the pathway the language of the whole site: it tags the live class list and the email tags a visitor is assigned. The result is shareable as a link and prints with a QR code that goes straight to booking.
A calendar that keeps itself current
Rezerv has no public API, and its stock widget can’t look like The Well or understand pathways. So we built a native class list on the private API its own widgets use. Rezerv opens a new class category every month; our list rebuilds that category list live, so a new month simply appears with no code change. Dates anchor to Johannesburg time, so the calendar opens on the studio’s today wherever the visitor is, and a calm fallback covers the rare moment the API is down.
The brand, built
The site runs on a bespoke Shopify theme, “Oasis”, of 86 hand-built sections: a cinematic hero with a word-by-word reveal and film grain, then warm editorial story tiles in the brand’s Root, Mousse and Clay palette. Under it sit four membership tiers, a full massage menu, The Well Collective of practitioners, and 38 pages that give each class, therapy and recovery treatment its own home.
The result
The Well is live at thewell.africa. The client’s feedback became the work: a review checklist turned their notes into a tracked list, and eight of the ten items they approved went live in two short rounds. A client screen recording exposed a booking dead-end on the events page, which became a concrete reorder. We kept their wording where they asked, even against our own research, and never showed a price they hadn’t confirmed.
For engineersThe quiz rubric, the Rezerv integration, and the events merge
The Guide is a 3-question rubric: each answer adds weighted points to
the three pathways, and the “why this matched” copy comes from the same signals, so the
explanation always agrees with the result. The whole result is encoded in a compact
?s= parameter, which is what makes it shareable; on print the page injects
a QR code that deep-links to booking.
The class list calls Rezerv’s widget-api.rezerv.co/v1/public endpoints
(/classes, /timetable) and rebuilds the category list on load.
Pathway chips come from a class-name → pathway mapping colored with the theme’s own
tokens: Reset (Mousse), Revitalise (Clay), Deepen (Root).
The events page merges a curated editorial layer with a concurrent scan of
/timetable, cached in localStorage for about 20 minutes.
Every business date is anchored to Africa/Johannesburg. The FAQ ships
FAQPage JSON-LD.
A brand you can feel, a quiz that guides rather than sells, and a booking calendar that runs itself.