Abby’s Elderberry

A family making elderberry syrup in small batches had outgrown what a hosted store could do. The business had five distinct ways of selling — direct, subscription, bundle, wholesale, and independent sales reps — and a platform that only really understood the first one. Every additional channel meant another spreadsheet.

The bottleneck was not the storefront, it was the catalog. Once one product record can carry pricing identities for several sales channels at once, subscriptions and wholesale and bundles stop being separate systems and become views onto the same data. That is a backend decision that determines what the front end is allowed to be.

Apothecary without the costume. A deep plum and lavender palette with a berry accent — a genuinely owned color, not a wellness-category default — set in a variable serif over a humanist sans. Photography is warm and domestic: hands, kitchens, natural light. The register is heritage-craft, but the interface is a modern store.

A custom storefront over a hosted database and object store, with a bundle builder that turns choosing into a guided five, ten, or twenty flow with the discount built in. Subscriptions, wholesale, affiliate, and sales-rep programs each get a real route rather than a contact form.

Product records carry pricing identifiers for several channels simultaneously, so the same item can be sold direct, on subscription, and through a legacy channel without divergent inventory. Images are served from object storage rather than the repo, which keeps the catalog editable by the client without a deploy.