Mai Re

The Challenge

The client runs a family-owned spice business where every sale starts with a WhatsApp conversation — pricing flexes, wholesale enquiries get negotiated, trust is built one chat at a time. A standard e-commerce build would have broken what was already working. The site needed to bring online discovery to the business without replacing the human conversation that converted browsers into buyers. And the owner — non-technical — needed to be able to add products, update prices, and mark items out of stock on her own, forever, without calling a developer.

The Approach

The architecture was inverted from a typical e-commerce build: no checkout, no payment gateway, no inventory counts, no user accounts. Instead, the catalog feeds an enquiry-list pattern — visitors add items with variant and quantity, and a single button serialises the entire cart into a pre-filled WhatsApp message. The conversation continues exactly where it always did, but now with a clean order summary instead of back-and-forth questions. For owner autonomy, Sanity CMS sits behind every piece of editable content — products, categories, hero copy, contact info — with Studio embedded at /studio so there's one URL to remember and no second login. The design system was derived from the brand's existing logo (maroon wordmark, gold leaf mark) rather than imposed on it: warm cream backgrounds instead of pure white, Cormorant Garamond for editorial weight, gold used once per screen as a restraint signal. Operating cost was held at ₹0/month at launch by running entirely on free tiers (Vercel, Sanity, Resend) — important for a small business that didn't want a recurring SaaS bill attached to its website.

The Outcome

Shipped as a five-page production site with full CMS autonomy for the owner. Every product page, category, and site-wide string is editable from Sanity Studio without code changes. The enquiry-to-WhatsApp flow tested end-to-end on iOS and Android — orders arrive in WhatsApp formatted and ready to confirm. The site honours the brand's heritage positioning (no market-fresh modernism, no e-commerce template feel) and stays out of the way of the conversation that closes sales.