December 25, 2025
E-Commerce Development | December 2025 - Present
When my mom - a Native American artisan living in a small rural mountain town in Wyoming - showed me her collection of handcrafted beaded lighter cases, I saw an opportunity. She had already shared them with friends and family, but I wanted to help her reach a wider audience and earn additional income from her craft.
I built Spirit Beads (thebeadedcase.com), a full-featured e-commerce platform designed to provide a boutique shopping experience while keeping running costs significantly lower than hosted solutions like Shopify. This project allowed me to apply enterprise architecture patterns I learned at Oracle and Salesforce to help my mom scale her business.
The goal was clear: create a polished, professional online store that could compete with big platforms but at a fraction of the cost. Beyond just the website, I needed to solve the entire product pipeline—from photography to inventory management to payment processing.
1. AI-Generated UI Integration
I used Lovable to generate the initial UI components and email templates. However, Lovable's default output is designed for SaaS apps with stats and analytics dashboards—not product photography. I had to creatively adapt and integrate these components to showcase my mom's beaded lighter cases as the heroes of the site, transforming generic stats displays into elegant product showcases.
2. Infinite Scroll with Section Links and Filters
One of the most complex challenges was implementing infinite scroll that works seamlessly with:
Getting all three to play nicely together required careful state management and scroll position tracking. The infinite scroll needed to detect when users arrived via section links versus when they were actively browsing, and the filters needed to reset the scroll state without losing user context.
3. Inventory Processing Pipeline
The biggest operational challenge was the initial bulk inventory upload. I had only one trip home to Wyoming to take photos, then I had to return to Silicon Valley for work. This meant I couldn't reshoot products—I had to make the photos I had work perfectly.
My solution was a sophisticated image processing pipeline:
The GAN upscaling was crucial - it let me take photos with whatever I had available and enhance them to consistent, professional quality. Most background removal solutions don't preserve fine details, so I had to find one that maintained the intricate beadwork.
AI-Powered Product Categorization
With hundreds of unique lighter cases, manually categorizing them would have been tedious and inconsistent. I leveraged Google's Gemini API to automate the entire categorization process. The script analyzed each product image to identify visual similarities, grouping them into four distinct categories based on design patterns: Infinite Path, Earth's Hue, Ancestral Motifs, and Traditional Rhythms. For each product, Gemini also generated a descriptive name based on its appearance and assigned category. The script ensured no duplicate names were created, maintaining a unique identity for every handcrafted item in the catalog.
4. Mobile-First Responsive Design
My mom's customers are primarily mobile users, so I optimized the entire experience for high-resolution mobile devices while ensuring full support for tablets and desktop PCs. The site uses React 18 with a mobile-first Tailwind CSS approach, ensuring every feature works flawlessly on phones.
useCart, useCheckout) for optimized state management without external librariesDynamic product grid with category-based filtering, allowing customers to browse by design style (Infinite Path, Earth's Hue, Ancestral Motifs, Traditional Rhythms).
Persistent shopping cart that survives page refreshes, with a streamlined checkout flow powered by Stripe's secure payment processing.
For unique requests, I built a sophisticated custom order system:
Products and prices automatically sync with Stripe, keeping the local database as the single source of truth while leveraging Stripe's robust infrastructure for transactions.
When orders are marked as "paid" (via Stripe webhook), inventory automatically updates—ensuring accurate stock levels without manual intervention.
Building Spirit Beads was an incredible learning experience that let me apply enterprise patterns to a real small business:
From Oracle: I learned how to structure APIs for scalability and reliability. The Django REST Framework backend follows clean separation of concerns with modular apps for products, orders, payments, and custom orders.
From Salesforce: I learned the importance of user experience and intuitive admin interfaces. The Django Admin integration makes inventory management simple for non-technical users.
On My Own: I solved problems I'd never encountered before—computer vision for product photography, GAN upscaling for image quality, and the complex dance of infinite scroll with filters and section links.
By building a custom solution instead of using Shopify, we achieved:
The only costs are hosting and Stripe fees—a tiny fraction of what a hosted platform would charge.
Visit thebeadedcase.com to see the store in action.
Each lighter case is unique—handcrafted with care by a Native American artisan in the mountains of Wyoming.