A small portfolio, made with care.
Four sites. Four neighbors. Each one shipped, each one earning its keep — the shop, the service crew, the restaurant, the importer.
U-Wrench — one shop, two ways to fix it.
A 15-year-old auto shop in Vail with an unusual pitch: rent a lift and tools and do the job yourself, or hand the keys to the ASE-certified crew. Two audiences, one site. We built a custom WordPress theme that lets a DIY-er and a regular customer each find what they need in a click, without the site picking sides.
Full case study →The problem
U-Wrench has been around since 2009, but they’d never had a site that explained the dual model — DIY rental on one hand, full mechanic services on the other. New visitors couldn’t tell which was on offer, and the previous template treated them as the same thing. The shop needed a site that surfaces both paths from the homepage and goes deep on every individual service the crew performs.
What we built
- Custom WordPress theme with split DIY and Automotive Repair tracks, each with its own landing page
- Custom service CPT (uwrench_service) — ten individual service pages (oil change, brake pads, suspension, transmission, diagnostics, …) all editable in the block editor
- Custom testimonial CPT pulling three real customer reviews into a homepage section
- Trust band on the home — 15+ years, 2,500+ cars serviced, ASE certified, 4.9★ — pulled from real shop data, not stock copy
- Mobile-first layout with click-to-call in the masthead and the address tap-to-map (most traffic is en route)
- Local SEO pass for "DIY auto shop Tucson" and Vail-area ZIPs, plus structured-data schema for every service
Where AI did the work
Drafted the ten individual service descriptions from a single conversation with the owner — what each job involves, when a DIY-er should attempt it vs. hand it to the mechanic, what tools are included with a lift rental. Generated meta descriptions across the whole site, then I edited each by hand to match the owner’s voice.
Touchup Maestros — a portfolio for thirty-five years of work.
A 35-year-old finish-restoration firm that touches up wood, stone, marble, and granite for hotels, resorts, and commercial properties across the country. Founder Robert Rauton trained in Paris and opened the Atlanta shop in 1995. The site needed to read like the specialty B2B firm it is — quiet, exact, with the actual property names on the work.
Full case study →The problem
Touchup Maestros sells to hotel and property managers — buyers who already know the trade and want proof of work, not a stock-photo splash. The previous site read like a small local shop and buried the things those buyers actually look for: service categories, maintenance-plan tiers, and the named properties they’ve served. The brand was thirty-five years old; the site read like ten.
What we built
- Custom WordPress theme that telegraphs the firm’s scale immediately — Mohawk Finishing Products partnership, 30+ years, 500+ properties served, nationwide service
- Custom Our Work post type (touchup_work) with named-property entries — Embassy Suites Atlanta Buckhead, Phipps Plaza, Saks 5th Ave, Lenbrook — each with a before/after writeup
- Maintenance Plans page with four contract tiers (1-, 2-, 3-, and 5-year), pitched at property-manager budget cycles
- Industries-served grid (Hotels, Resorts, Condominiums, Office Buildings, Museums, Conference Centers, Country Clubs, Restaurants, Government Contractors) so a buyer sees themselves in seconds
- Block editor configured so the team can add a new completed job — photos, property name, scope, finish — in under five minutes
Where AI did the work
Drafted the case-study writeups for the touchup_work entries from a few photos and a sentence of context per project. Helped translate Robert’s craft vocabulary (color matching, French-polish technique, refinishing vs. restoration) into copy a property manager could read at a glance, then handed everything back for his edit pass.
Elevated — a grinder you can scroll apart.
A bespoke storefront for a precision grinder, built from scratch in React and Go. The headline feature is a scroll-driven 3D product page that telescopes the four parts apart as the user scrolls, focusing on the interesting face of each part — top cap teeth, chamber blades, kief screen, base. Underneath it sits a full B2B wholesale backend: invitation, tax-ID capture, approval workflow, and tier pricing.
Full case study →The problem
Off-the-shelf e-commerce — Shopify, Woo — couldn’t render the grinder the way the brand needed it shown. The product is a tactile, machined object; the page should feel like inspecting it in your hand. And the brand sells two ways: direct-to-consumer at retail, and B2B to dispensaries and headshops at wholesale. Bolting together a 3D viewer plug-in and a wholesale plug-in gets you something that works for neither audience. So we built both halves from the floor up.
What we built
- Bespoke 3D product page in react-three/fiber: four STL parts loaded individually, normalized to a target assembly height, then animated apart on scroll. An IntersectionObserver fires each stage as the user crosses the middle 30% of the viewport, and the scene damps the parts toward their telescope-expanded positions while rotating each focused part to show its interesting face head-on.
- End-to-end typed RPC layer — Buf-managed protobuf in `proto/`, with Go service stubs and TypeScript Connect-Query hooks generated from one source of truth. Same message types on both sides, no hand-rolled fetch.
- Full B2B wholesale subsystem — admin invites a wholesaler with email, company name, tax ID, and approval status; tier pricing flows through `usePricingContext` so the same product page shows retail prices to retail and wholesale prices to authenticated wholesalers, no duplicate pages.
- Stripe checkout, order history (lookup by email or login), and an admin order dashboard with line-item drill-down. Print-on-demand fulfillment hooks (Prodigi-style) ready for the next product.
- Multi-tenant platform — same codebase serves multiple storefronts, resolved by domain via a `GetSiteByDomain` RPC. Per-site seed directories with content blocks, designs, and domain mappings.
- Go 1.24 + Connect RPC + GORM + SQLite on the backend; React 18 + TypeScript + Tailwind + TanStack Query + Zustand on the frontend; Webpack bundler; Doppler for secrets; Docker for everything.
Where AI did the work
Drafted the stage-narrative copy for the grinder PDP from a one-page spec — what each part is, why it matters, what makes it different from a $20 grinder on Amazon. Wrote first passes of the wholesale email templates and the admin help text. Generated TypeScript types and React Query hooks from protobuf, then I tuned the 3D camera framing and the IntersectionObserver thresholds by hand.
Tucson Kei — a showroom for the cars, a brief for the work.
Arizona’s only owner-operated Kei dealer — Japanese mini trucks, vans, and SUVs imported from auction in Japan, then fully reconditioned for the Sonoran desert and backed by a 12-month / 12,000-mile labor warranty. The site is part inventory magazine, part trust-building brief: the differentiator isn’t that they import, it’s that they recondition, and every page makes that legible.
Full case study →The problem
Kei vehicles are niche enough that most buyers travel from out of state — for many, the site is the lot. Other importers ship a car from Japan and list it; Tucson Kei tears into every vehicle, replaces fluids and brakes and tires, recharges the A/C for 110°F summers, and warranties their work. The site had to telegraph that difference in seconds, host a real inventory with deep filtering by make/type/condition, and feed listings programmatically from the owner’s sourcing pipeline.
What we built
- Custom WordPress theme with a `kei_car` post type and three custom taxonomies — make (Daihatsu / Honda / Mitsubishi / Suzuki), vehicle type (truck / van / SUV / Jimny), and condition — so visitors can drill in any direction and the URLs match the way enthusiasts think about the cars
- A four-step How It Works section on the home that puts the actual differentiator above the fold: source from Japan auctions → fully recondition in-shop → handle customs + Arizona title → hand over keys with a 12-month / 12,000-mile labor warranty
- Custom kei-car-api WordPress plugin (bearer-token auth, SHA-256 hashing, rate-limited, full request/response audit log) so the owner can push new inventory programmatically — image URLs auto-download into the media library, taxonomies auto-create as new makes appear
- Nine-plus marketing pages that go deep on the things buyers actually ask about — Arizona Kei laws, the reconditioning checklist, parts and accessories, service offerings — instead of one shallow inventory page
- Light Japanese typography on the site (ゴールデンウィーク banner, 軽自動車 footer mark) plus a real Golden Week closure system so the owner can take the week off without anyone wondering why inquiries went quiet
- Site Kit by Google for analytics; Yoast for schema.org structured data on every inventory listing so the cars surface properly in Google’s vehicle-listing results
Where AI did the work
Drafted the model-by-model glossary that helps a first-time buyer tell a Suzuki Jimny from a Daihatsu Hijet, then wrote the reconditioning-checklist copy from the owner’s notes. Generated SEO meta descriptions for every inventory page on import; drafted the Arizona Kei Laws explainer that answers the title-and-registration questions every out-of-state buyer asks. The owner reviewed each piece, in his voice, before it shipped.
Tell us about your business.
A short call, no pitch. If we’re a fit we’ll send a one-page proposal within a week. If we’re not, we’ll point you somewhere good.
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