The Client
I Can Compose provides online composition courses and downloadable teaching resources for secondary school music departments. It was founded by composer and music teacher Rachel Shapey, who built the business out of a gap she kept running into in her own classroom – there simply weren’t good, structured resources for teaching composition.
Since launch, I Can Compose has won a Music Teacher Award and a UKRI Creative Catalyst Award, published courses used by schools across the UK and internationally, and Rachel’s first book was published by Collins Music. The business now supports well over a thousand teachers and students, with a growing library of courses and classroom resources behind a single login.
The Brief
Rachel came to us at the very beginning, before there was a logo, a brand, or a website. She had a clear idea of what teachers needed and a plan to sell it online, but nothing to sell it with.
The commercial model was the hard part. This wasn’t a shop selling one thing to one person. A student might buy a single course. A teacher might want everything, and need to pay by invoice because that’s how schools work. And a Head of Music might want to put an entire GCSE class through the platform at once, buying seats in bulk, handing them out to named students, and topping up when a new cohort arrives.
Getting that right mattered more than anything else on the site. If buying seats for a class was confusing, the schools market (the most valuable one) would never open up.
The Outcome
I Can Compose went from an idea to a trading business with a brand, a website and a working membership platform behind it. Schools can now buy classroom access in a couple of minutes, invite students by email or shareable link, and see who has taken up their seats, without a single email to support.
For teachers, that changes what a composition lesson can look like. Students work through structured courses at their own pace, collecting badges and certificates as they go, which frees the teacher to spend their time on the students who actually need them rather than leading the whole room through the same slide.
The brand and the site have grown with the business ever since. We’ve gone on to produce booklets, stationery, fabric table runners and exhibition banners as I Can Compose has taken the business out to music education conferences and events, so the brand holds together in a hall full of teachers as well as on screen.
Our Approach
Brand first, before a line of code
I Can Compose was selling to music teachers, a professional, discerning audience who would judge the credibility of the resources by the look of the thing offering them. We built the identity first, so the website had a brand to be designed around rather than the other way round, and so Rachel had something to trade under from day one.
Design the buying journey, not just the pages
Three very different customers arrive at this site: a student, a teacher, and a school with a budget. We mapped each of them to their own route through individual courses, a Teacher Access Plan, and tiered Classroom Access so nobody has to work out which one they are. The pricing does the qualifying.
Make the free version easy to find
Composition is a subject teachers are often nervous about teaching, so asking for £145 before anyone has seen the material was never going to work. Free courses and taster lessons are built into the structure of the site, giving teachers a genuine try-before-you-buy route into a paid plan.
Build for how schools actually pay
Schools don’t buy on a card at 9pm. We built invoicing into the checkout, so a teacher can complete an order, get a proper invoice raised, and have access switched on when finance releases the payment. It’s a small piece of functionality that removed the single biggest barrier to school sales.
What we delivered
Logo & Branding
We created the I Can Compose identity from scratch for a business that didn’t yet exist; a name in the client’s voice, given a mark that reads as musical without being a cliché, and a palette and type system that works as well on a classroom poster as it does on a login screen.
Logo
Colours
Fonts
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Web Design
Built on WordPress, the site brings a course library, a shop, a members’ area and a school seat-management system together in one place.
The site is hosted and maintained by us on an ongoing care plan, with the platform kept updated and supported as the course library and the membership base have grown year on year.
The Membership Platform
The heart of the project is the system that lets a school buy access for a whole class. Built on LifterLMS and WooCommerce Memberships with a good deal of custom development on top, it lets a teacher buy seats at a price that scales with the size of the class, hand them out by email or shareable link, and top up mid-year from their own dashboard — while each student gets their own login, progress tracking and certificates. Off-the-shelf membership plugins assume one person buys one membership for themselves; almost none handle one person buying many and giving them away, and closing that gap is what opened up the schools market for the business.
Print & Display
As the business has grown we’ve kept the brand consistent off screen as well as on it — printing student and teacher booklets, business stationery, fabric table runners and pull-up banners for the music education conferences and exhibitions where I Can Compose meets its customers face to face.
