WooCommerce – help with menus

I’m a WordPress and WooCommerce newbie, my skills are in HTML, CSS & JQuery. I’m attempting to build a site for a friend and have hit a bit of a brick wall – apologies if this is a bit of sprawling question.

They want a shop that sells food related merchandise – posters, t-shirts, prints etc. His idea is to have a horizontal menu along the bottom of the main site listing all of the food designs e.g. apples, eggs, pineapples etc. This will be in the form of a carousel style menu with each food type being represented by a picture of the food. He then wants a vertical menu on the side of the page with the various product types. Each product is available with each food design. The basic navigation idea is to be able to select a product type from the vertical menu, then click any of the food types in the horizontal menu to see the varying designs. Also, a user should be able to select a food type from the horizontal menu then see the various products with that design on. As an added challenge, I want each food type to have a different background image for the main div.

Is this something that I should be able to achieve with WooCommerce? So far, I have got the basic layout working and have been playing with the different product types – currently I have them set as categories and the food types are set as attributes.

Any advice would be massively appreciated, I really don’t want to let them down!!