Stealth Forge: Performance Apparel E-Commerce Platform

Stealth Forge sells performance gym and sports apparel across three very different shopper groups — Kids, Men, and Women — and needed a storefront that could hold seasonal promotions, colour and size variants, and three-way category browsing without turning into three disconnected stores. A generic template catalogue breaks down here: a parent shopping for a kids' hoodie, a lifter shopping for training joggers, and someone comparing jean fits by size all need the same filter-and-checkout mechanics to feel tailored to what they're actually buying — on a site fast enough that a promotional banner doesn't cost the sale, with a checkout that doesn't add friction at the one moment that matters most.

Core Pain Points Addressed:

• ❌ No unified storefront — Kids, Men's, and Women's lines had no shared browsing or checkout experience.
• ❌ No fast way to narrow the catalogue — shoppers had no price filtering or sort to get from browsing to a decision quickly.
• ❌ Checkout friction — no one-tap payment option alongside card, and no account view of past orders.
• ❌ No self-serve trust signals — returns and refunds had no dedicated flow shoppers could act on themselves.
• ❌ No admin console — updating products, prices, or order status meant a developer, not store staff.

Category Storefront

Kids, Men, and Women's collections browsable from a shared homepage and shop view, with gender-filtered shop links and category pages that share one underlying catalogue rather than three separate builds.

Filtering & Quick View

A price-range slider and Featured / Newest / Price sort narrow the catalogue fast, and a Quick View modal lets shoppers preview a product without leaving the grid they're browsing.

Variant-Aware Product Pages

Colour and size selection, a quantity selector, and a ‘You May Also Like’ related-products rail on every product detail page.

Checkout & Account

Card and Apple Pay checkout in one flow, plus a customer account area with order history, a saved wishlist, and a self-serve refund request page.

Admin Panel

A dedicated console for managing products, categories, pricing, and orders — the operational side of the same system, kept separate from the buyer-facing storefront.

01. Two roles, one data model

Buyer and admin read and write the same underlying products, categories, and orders rather than running as two disconnected systems — a price or stock change admin makes is what the storefront shows on the very next request.

02. Three catalogues, one storefront

Kids, Men, and Women needed to feel like distinct shopping experiences without being three separate codebases. Category and gender became a filter dimension on one shop template, rather than a fork — so a promotion or a layout change ships once, everywhere.

03. Variant selection without a reload

Colour and size selection on the product page updates image, price, and available stock in place, so trying a different size or colourway never costs a shopper a full page reload.

04. One checkout, two payment paths

Apple Pay sits inside the same checkout flow as card payment rather than as a separate express-checkout detour, so the payment method is purely a shopper preference.

05. Fast product imagery at scale

Product photography across catalogue grids and detail galleries is served through Next.js image optimization — responsively sized per device — instead of hand-cut image sets per breakpoint.

Next.js

Powers both roles from one codebase — category pages, product pages, and the shop view on the buyer side, and the product/order console on the admin side — with image optimization handling responsive product photography across the catalogue.

Tailwind CSS

Utility-driven styling behind the promotion banner, filters, product grids, and Quick View — consistent across every surface without a separate component library.

Node.js

Handles cart, checkout, wishlist, and account logic — the backend the storefront and account portal both read from and write to.

PostgreSQL

Stores the catalogue, orders, wishlist, and account data behind every category page and the account portal.

Stripe

Card and Apple Pay checkout in a single payment flow, so accepting either method didn't mean building two.

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