Suavius Atelier

A production-grade store for a boutique brand selling hand-designed PCB art coasters and laser-engraved wooden accessories. Built deliberately to double as a portfolio piece demonstrating a modern headless CMS stack.

What it is

An e-commerce store for a boutique brand, built to double as a portfolio piece demonstrating a modern headless CMS stack. Technically, the case study was about putting Payload CMS 3 to the test as an alternative to WooCommerce in a segment where product presentation and speed matter.

Why this stack instead of WooCommerce

WooCommerce would have worked, but it would have been slower, heavier and harder to maintain. A custom Payload CMS + Next.js build gives:

• Performance - no plugin bloat, no unused CSS, no JavaScript that does not earn its place.
• Security - no attack surface from third-party plugins. Hardened upload handling, server-authoritative pricing, webhook signature verification, CSP headers.
• Control - the data model is exactly what the business needs, nothing more.
• Cost - Cloudflare R2 (zero egress) for media, Neon serverless Postgres, Vercel. The whole stack runs at near-zero infrastructure cost at this scale.

Key features

The product catalogue with variants has SKU-level stock tracking, pricing in minor units (no floating-point bugs), a draft/publish workflow with version history, and full SEO fields.

The product personalization system is built on a reusable library of option types (engraving text, colour choices, customer artwork uploads), configurable globally and assigned per product. Customers can upload their own artwork for laser engraving. All uploads are content-sniffed, sanitized and served from an isolated origin.

Checkout and payments run on Stripe Checkout with a draft-order + webhook flow. Every amount is recomputed server-side - the client submits choices, never prices. Atomic exactly-once order finalization prevents double-processing under webhook retries.

Marketing pages, collections, categories and redirects are managed in the Payload admin. Changes go live via on-demand ISR, with no redeploy. On the operations side, the project has quality gates (typecheck + lint before push), migrations on deploy, post-deploy Playwright health checks and Renovate for dependencies.

Result

A working proof-of-concept showing you can leave the WordPress ecosystem with no compromise on store functionality. Mobile 95/100 on Google PageSpeed. The project was developed with AI coding assistants for scaffolding and boilerplate; the architecture decisions, security posture and code quality are mine.