Unplugged
Unplugged helps people disconnect from screens and reconnect with nature through curated retreat stays. Their website, unplugged.rest, needed to showcase these experiences while making booking simple, reliable, and flexible, a bigger challenge than your average site.
Custom Development
Client: Unplugged
Website development: Bonito Studio
When Bonito Studio stepped in, Unplugged already had a foot in the build, but things weren’t quite coming together.
They were building their website on Easol, an experience‑commerce platform that lets creators design and sell online (think booking, ecommerce, marketing and hosting all under one roof) with themes that use Liquid, HTML, CSS, JavaScript and JSON as the underlying structure for custom blocks and layouts.
But — plot twist — the backend that had been started was super unstructured. While the Unplugged team provided finished designs (which was amazing!), the actual build was already underway in Easol’s builder, which is designed to be basic and intuitive for most creators.
So our first big challenge was:
- What exactly had been built?
- What bits were missing?
- And how could we translate an ambitious booking flow into a system that wasn’t originally created for all that functionality?
Because Unplugged needed more than a brochure site, it needed a system that could:
- support bookings
- manage time‑based stays
- keep blocked dates
- and automatically handle availability in ways similar to larger booking platforms
…all within a builder that doesn’t natively support those features.
This wasn’t a straight “plug‑and‑play” project, it was a code‑and‑craft project.
Easol’s editor is perfect for creators who want a beautiful site without developers. But for Unplugged’s needs? We had to go deeper.
Here’s how we tackled it:
Unravelling the existing build
We started by untangling what had already been developed. Because Easol blocks and templates are modular and beginner‑friendly, we first needed to understand what was there before we could plan what needed to work.
Rewriting and extending functionality
Once we mapped the structure, we rewrote blocks and overwrote default behaviours so the backend would behave more like a flexible booking engine than a simple site builder. We extended templates with custom logic to handle:
- date blocking
- time‑based stays
- availability control
- and bespoke booking flows
All of this was done within Easol’s theme system, which uses Liquid templates plus front‑end code, so every tweak had to be creative, efficient and maintainable.
Testing like there’s no tomorrow
Because bookings are the lifeblood of Unplugged, everything had to just work. We tested edge cases: overlapping stays, blocked dates, overlapping customer selections, and edge‑case availability scenarios to make sure the new backend behaved confidently.
The Result
A functional, flexible booking website, where people can:
- select stays
- see availability
- book retreats
- block dates
- and enjoy a smooth, intuitive customer journey
Just like on big booking platforms, even though it was custom‑built inside a system that didn’t originally have those tools.
Unplugged now has a beautifully designed experience site that feels effortless on the front end, yet runs with genuine booking logic under the hood, all while empowering their team to manage content without breaking a sweat.
