01
Story-first product pages
Artisan profiles and an editorial journal sit alongside the catalog so every item is framed by the person who made it, putting merchandising and narrative in the same layout.
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Ashenda
A cultural-commerce marketplace for 240 Tigrayan women artisans. A full Next.js storefront engineered to tell every maker's story while it sells.
Overview
Ashenda is commerce with a mission: give 240 Tigrayan women artisans a global storefront. I built the full Next.js experience: a multi-currency catalog, artisan profiles, an editorial journal, events and a complete cart/checkout, fast and image-rich enough to do justice to handmade work.
The Challenge
What made it hard.
A marketplace built around craft can't look like a generic e-commerce template. Each product carries a maker's story, and that story is the reason people buy, yet the site still had to perform like a modern storefront with real checkout.
Selling across borders meant pricing in multiple currencies and staying fast despite a deeply image-heavy catalog.
Approach
How I solved it.
02
Real commerce, multi-currency
A full catalog with multi-currency pricing, cart and checkout. The storefront behaves like a proper shop, not a lookbook.
03
Fast despite the imagery
Next.js image optimization and careful loading keep a photo-dense catalog quick on any connection, so the visuals sell without slowing the sale.
What I Built
Shipped in the box.
- ✓Multi-currency product catalog with cart & checkout
- ✓Artisan profile pages connecting makers to their work
- ✓Editorial journal and events for community storytelling
- ✓Image-optimized, responsive Next.js storefront
- ✓CMS-driven content so the team can publish without a developer
Outcome
Where it landed.
240
Artisans onboarded
Multi
Currency checkout
Live
In production
Have something like this to build?
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