Flowz

Flowz is our own consumer brand. We sell playful magnet sets and keychains, designed digitally and finished by hand in our Belgian workshop, through flowz.be, and every part of the shop runs on software we built ourselves, from the storefront down to the machines in the workshop. Whenever we advise a client on e-commerce, this is where that advice was tested first.

The challenge

Shop platforms make it easy to open a store and hard to run a special one. We wanted three things they don’t give you out of the box: a storefront that loads fast, a configurator where customers design their own magnet box, and a production flow where an order reaches the workshop without anyone retyping it.

What we built

The storefront is an Astro site that loads fast and ranks well. Commerce runs on headless WooCommerce: catalog, cart and checkout live in WordPress, but customers never see a WordPress page. A Redis cache keeps product data quick to serve, and the checkout looks and feels like the rest of the shop.

The configurator is the piece we get the most reactions to. Customers compose their own magnet box, pick the magnets and put their own photo on the lid, and the order lands in production exactly as they configured it.

The workshop side runs on desktop apps we built with Tauri. A Creator App turns artwork into print-and-cut-ready files, a tile generator prepares the product sheets, and a Shop Manager handles daily operations.

Deep dive: the stack

Astro renders on the server with a middleware layer in front. A Redis product cache syncs incrementally against the WooCommerce source of truth. Cart and checkout talk to the WooCommerce Store API, and an nginx layer serves storefront and checkout as one domain. The desktop tooling is Tauri v2 with a Rust core and a Python backend for image processing. Deploys are containerized and go through canary checks before customers see anything.

How we work

Flowz is where our method proves itself on our own money. Features start as written specs, AI agents handle the build work, and nothing ships before a senior engineer has reviewed it. New shop features go through the same multi-agent review we run for client work.

Where it stands

Flowz sells and ships today. The platform has since grown to carry more than one brand, which became its own story: see Steam Machine Prints. When we propose an architecture for your shop, it is one we run our own revenue on.