Whittier, CaliforniaEst. 2014
Whittier Web DesignSouthern California Studio
Case study — Headless commerce

The Woodster Shop

A custom storefront and back office, built as one system — not a theme with a pile of apps.

thewoodstershop.com ↗Design, build & ops · Whittier Web Design
The Woodster Shop storefront: a grid of multilayer 3D laser-cut wood wall-art pieces — hummingbird, macaw, owl, sea turtle, iguana, frog, puffin and horse — each with a name and price.
The storefront — a custom Next.js catalog reading live from Sanity, not a marketplace theme every other shop is running.
01 — Challenge

A theme makes your store look like the last three stores your customer visited — and every feature is another monthly app injecting scripts into your pages.

The Woodster Shop needed a storefront that looked like nobody's, and a back office that wasn't a subscription pile. So we built it headless — one codebase, owned end to end.

02 — Approach

A custom headless build, not a plug-in stack.

A Next.js 16 storefront on Sanity CMS, with Stripe checkout, Clerk accounts and Shippo fulfilment, deployed on Vercel. Every surface is designed, not chosen from a marketplace.

Next.js 16Sanity CMSStripeClerkShippoVercel
03 — What we built · the hook

The Art Wall Designer

Customers arrange laser-cut pieces and preview the whole wall before they buy. It reads live from the product catalog and writes back a saved wall to the customer's account — a purpose-built tool a marketplace theme has no way to produce.

The Woodster Shop Art Wall Designer: a customer arranges laser-cut wood art pieces on a virtual wall, with the piece catalog on the left and a running cart total.
The Art Wall Designer, live on thewoodstershop.com.
04 — Not an app pile

The shop and the back office are the same build.

Inventory, margins, orders, shipping-label buying, analytics and an Etsy channel all run from one codebase — not a storefront bolted to a stack of subscription apps.

Next.js 16 + Sanity CMS
One codebase · one content model
Storefront
Product catalogArt Wall DesignerClerk accountsStripe checkout
Back office
InventoryMarginsOrdersShipping labelsAnalyticsEtsy channel
05 — Content model

26 Sanity schemas model the whole business.

Not just products and variations — raw materials, suppliers, purchase orders, manufacturing runs and box profiles are all first-class content.

productproductVariationcategoryoptionCategoryoptionValuerawMaterialmaterialCategorysupplierpurchaseOrdermanufacturingRunprepRuntapeLayoutboxProfileordercustomerreviewsavedWall+9 more
06 — Measured, desktop
98/100
Lighthouse 12.8.2 · desktop · mobile optimization in progress
0
Cumulative layout shift
0 ms
Total blocking time
1.1 s
Largest contentful paint
0.4 s
First contentful paint