About — Akingbehin Akintayo
AKINTAYO is the working name of Akingbehin Akintayo — an ecommerce web designer in Nigeria, working with table tennis businesses internationally.
Why this niche
Most web designers work across whatever comes in — a dentist, a law firm, a clothing brand, a gym. It is a reasonable way to make a living and it has one structural cost: every project begins with the designer learning the client’s market from zero, on the client’s time and the client’s money.
I removed that cost by going narrow. Table tennis is a real market with real money in it — manufacturers, multi-brand retailers, distributors, clubs, academies, coaches, tournaments — and very little of it is served by people who understand both the sport’s equipment and how an ecommerce store actually converts.
So that is the business. Two table tennis ecommerce stores and one coaching practice so far, with the work and the numbers documented on this site.
Beyond table tennis
I have worked in ecommerce for a long time, and not only in this sport. The most recent example outside it is ORIMI — a fine jewellery house selling made-to-order pieces in solid 18K gold with natural diamonds and precious gemstones, built on Shopify and shipping to more than twenty-five countries.
Its positioning is “sculptural fine jewellery, rooted in Yoruba philosophy”, with collections named AJÉ, INÁ and ÀWO. A five-figure ring and a $40 rubber sheet are not the same sale, but they are the same discipline: make the thing legible, make it trustworthy, and get out of the way at the moment someone decides to buy.
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How I work
01
A portfolio should carry numbers where numbers exist and say so plainly where they do not. Everything on this site follows that rule, including the parts that would look better if it did not — the Table Tennis USA traffic figures among them.
02
Design decisions made before anyone understands the products are guesses. In this sport the products are technical and the guesses are usually wrong.
03
On Table Tennis USA I did the UX design and the Shopify implementation. I hand over working websites, not concept files for someone else to interpret and dilute.
04
Ownership transferred, domain connected, structure editable. A site the owner cannot change is a site that goes stale within a year.
Working in
Most table tennis stores run on Shopify, so most of my ecommerce work does too — theme customisation and Liquid rather than fighting the platform.
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Off the clock
You are hiring a person, not a studio. It is reasonable to want to know who that is before you send money across an ocean.
Study
I am a PharmD candidate at Obafemi Awolowo University. Pharmacy is a degree in reading technical specifications carefully and getting the details exactly right — which turns out to be most of this job too.
Chess
The thing most people do not know about me. Chess is pattern recognition and thinking several moves past the obvious one, under time pressure. It is closer to conversion work than it sounds.
Gadgets
My genuine obsession. I want to see them, hold them, unbox them. Caring how a physical object feels in the hand is not unrelated to caring how an interface feels under a thumb.
Base
I am in Nigeria and my clients are not. Everything runs over email and shipped work, which is why this site leads with evidence rather than a headshot and a promise.
Working with me
There is no account manager between you and the person doing the work, and nothing is handed to a junior after the pitch. You email me, I answer, I build it.
That is a limit as much as a feature: I take a small number of projects, and if the timing does not work I will tell you rather than stretch a schedule you are paying for.
Contact
One email with your site and the problem is enough to start. I read and reply to every one myself.