Key Takeaways
- Took a one-person product company from nothing launched to a complete direct-to-consumer commerce platform: design, copy, theme, checkout, customizer, analytics and hosting.
- Built the customizer the product depends on: up to six engravable sides, 39 typefaces rendered live in the picker, drag-to-position text, and a preview generated from the actual production template so the customer sees the exact geometry the laser receives.
- Connected checkout to fabrication: the customer's design file is linked inside the Stripe payment record, so the fabricator clicks from payment straight to production artwork.
- Ran commerce without platform overhead, with checkout created on the fly through Stripe and pricing computed from the customer's configuration.
- Wrote every page of the site by hand, including the trust and policy content a first-time commerce brand needs to convert.
- Handed the operation over cleanly, with the fabricator holding admin access, analytics visibility and his own backups.
Organization
Legacy Memorial Products sells the Legacy Capsule, a patented pocket-sized brass keepsake urn with six flat engravable faces, sold on the idea that a life is worth more than a name and dates. The company was a single founder with a patent, a product design and a fabrication partner.
Challenge
Everything a larger client already has had to be created: the name, the domain, the logo, the brand, the copy, the storefront and the production pipeline. The central engineering question was the file format: nobody could initially describe exactly what the laser needed, and the entire customization experience had to be designed backward from that answer.
Solution
- The production format established first, with sample engravings round-tripped through the fabricator's laser software before the web output was designed.
- A Vue customizer with two modes: guided multi-side text design, and a template download and upload path for customers working in their own vector tools.
- Order processing that renders each side to production-ready SVG, combines them into a single labelled design file, and stores the link in the payment record.
- A custom WordPress theme with Stripe Checkout, dynamic pricing by configuration, and a purchase confirmation flow built for a sensitive product category.
- Brand identity, logo, typography across 39 offered families, and hand-written copy for every page.
- Kinsta hosting behind Cloudflare, a deploy pipeline, GA4 measurement and a dedicated end-to-end order testing environment.
Results
- A complete storefront and production pipeline delivered for a first-time founder.
- Same-day order-to-production turnaround.
- Half an hour to ninety minutes of manual work removed per order.
- $1,200 to $3,600 a year in platform and licensing cost avoided.
- Patent D 1,098,661 published and linked as a trust signal for shoppers, search engines and AI assistants.