Build a niche store without becoming a one-off.
Vastura Ag couldn't be a throwaway storefront — it had to be the working reference implementation for everything we'd later sell to small businesses. That meant building every convention (theme structure, build pipeline, locale handling, image pipeline, cross-store-promo, settings_schema) to the same standard we'd hand to a client.
Treat the live store as the product, not just a storefront.
Single canonical theme source. PowerShell build pipeline with version tracker. SemVer for major releases (v15.x.x), iteration counter for build cycles (v66.x). EN/FR locale scaffolding from day one. Image-gen pipeline integrated to keep product photography cost-controlled at scale (263 Pollinations-generated images compressed via TinyPNG). Sub-categories grid driven by smart-collection tags. Every pattern documented for reuse.
Live, conversion-ready, and the source of truth for the family.
Vastura Ag is the live demo of what we deliver. Every convention proven here ports to the niche stores in the family — Vastura Ltd's rebuild started from this playbook; Vastura Digital's theme baseline is a fork of this code. The image-gen pipeline, build script, and locale convention are all reusable platform components, not store- specific code.