Building a Cannabis Retailer's Website Where Every Rule Actually Matters: Inside the Fleur De Bis Build

Published Feb 2, 2026 · 8 min read

The brief

Fleur De Bis is a legal Canadian cannabis retailer. That single fact changes almost everything about how a website gets built, compared to a bakery or a tire shop. Every page needed to assume it might be the first thing a regulator, not just a customer, ever looks at.

Problem one: the age gate has to be real, not decorative

A lot of cannabis sites treat their age verification screen as a formality — a click-through modal that doesn't actually block anything a curious teenager couldn't bypass in two seconds. We built ours to actually gate entry to the site: no product data, no imagery, nothing renders behind it until the visitor confirms their age. It sounds simple. Getting it to load instantly, look premium, and not feel like a legal disclaimer bolted onto a nice site took real design work.

Problem two: the product catalog isn't a page, it's data

This is the part most people don't expect. A cannabis retailer doesn't sell “five products.” Fleur De Bis's catalog runs north of fifty SKUs — the same strain lineage sold across different weights, formats (dried flower, ground, pre-rolls, oil), and cannabinoid percentages that shift by batch. We didn't hand-write fifty product cards. We built a single structured data array — strain name, category, format, THC/CBD range, terpene profile, a short aromatic description — and let the page render every card, filter, and search match from that one source of truth. Add a new weight variant of an existing strain and it's one new line of data, not a new page.

Problem three: atmosphere without the weight

The brand wanted a moody, cinematic feel — ambient background video, a curated soundtrack the visitor could opt into, rich full-bleed product photography. All of that is exactly the kind of thing that turns into a bloated, glitchy site if you're not careful, which is precisely what happened before we got involved: raw camera footage running as background video at multiple megabits per second, autoplaying on every device including phones on cellular data. We rebuilt every video at a fraction of the original size — re-encoded, scaled to the resolution it's actually displayed at, stripped of audio tracks it didn't need — without a visible drop in quality. The atmosphere stayed. The 40-second load time didn't.

Problem four: bilingual by default

Operating in Quebec means French isn't an afterthought translation layer, it's core content — product descriptions, aromatic profiles, terpene names, all written to read naturally in both languages, with search that matches across both.

What we'd tell any regulated-industry client

The rulebook doesn't have to fight the design. Compliance and a beautiful, fast site aren't opposites — they just both need to be planned for on day one, instead of one getting bolted onto the other after the fact.