Sitnowood.
an e-commerce store for my brother-in-law’s handmade wooden products. bowls, lichtenberg bowls, candle holders, and eventually furniture.
this project has a long history. I first tried building it when I was 14 with HTML and Bootstrap. I had almost no backend knowledge and didn’t even know what Stripe was. that didn’t work.
then I went through Node, Strapi, Hydrogen, other CMSes. none of them clicked. building real commerce with headless CMS + headless e-commerce is painful, especially when you’re still learning.
so I made them an Etsy shop. we sold some products but the fees ate into everything and we ended up net negative. we decided the move was to build our own store with full control and start building a brand properly.
then Payload came along and everything changed.
I’ve been working on Sitnowood for over a year, iterating on every part of it. the variant system, the product architecture, marketing blocks, optimistic cart, dashboard widgets, the admin experience. all of it built, tested, refined.
this is the codebase that Kickwear was later built on top of. every reusable system I mentioned there, the variant combinations, the size tables, the CMS components, the content blocks, started here.
the store is fully functional. the only thing left is final content, products, and going live with payments. then marketing.