All work
2026
Things — An e-commerce marketplace built for taste
Designed and built an editorial e-commerce marketplace from scratch — storefront, product detail pages, cart, and merchant onboarding — for a client positioning their brand as the antidote to generic online stores.
- Client
- Things
- Role
- Frontend Engineer & Designer · Independent build
- Year
- 2026
- Stack
- Next.jsTypeScriptTailwind CSSMDXStripeVercelFramer Motion
The brief
The Things team came in with a thesis: e-commerce in their category looked the same as it did in 2014, and the brands they wanted to host deserved better. The brief was to design and build a storefront that read like a print magazine, sold like a polished store, and gave merchants tools that didn't feel hostile.
I owned design, frontend architecture, and integrations end-to-end.
Approach
- Editorial first, commerce second. Typography, generous gutters, and image-led product cards — but every flow (search, filter, add-to-cart, checkout) optimized for conversion.
- A small, bespoke design system. Built primitives in Tailwind with strict variants, so the storefront and the merchant dashboard share a vocabulary without being visually identical.
- MDX-driven editorial. Story pages, brand pages, and category landings live in MDX so the marketing team can ship copy without me. Vercel rebuilds on push.
- Stripe + Vercel + the full checklist. Payments via Stripe, deploy on Vercel, dynamic OG images per product, sitemap auto-generated, structured data for products.
Outcome
- Lighthouse 95+ on the homepage, product grid, and product detail pages.
- Shipped in six weeks from a blank Figma file to live on a custom domain.
- A platform the client now ships into themselves — content updates land via PR or the optional Sanity Studio I integrated for non-technical team members.
