A store that sells hand-stitched textiles to buyers abroad
A storefront for a workshop of nakshi kantha artisans selling quilts, throws and cushion covers to buyers in the UK, the Gulf and North America. One-of-a-kind stock, priced in the buyer’s currency, shipped from Dhaka.
Concept project. Designed by OnTek to show how we would solve this problem; not work done for a client. The figures are the targets it was built against.
- Product
- Kantha House
- Industry
- Retail
- Year
- 2026
- Timeline
- 8 weeks
What it is built to do
The targets the build was designed and tested against. A concept, so these are design targets rather than a client’s measured results.
4
Currencies at checkout
Pounds, dirhams, dollars and taka, priced at the day’s rate.
3
Minutes to list a piece
The target from photograph to live listing, on a phone.
0
Double sales
A single piece can be paid for once; tested under load.
Thebrief
Handmade textiles sell well abroad and badly online. Every quilt is one of a kind, so a normal store’s stock counts are wrong the moment one sells, and buyers in London will not pay in taka or wait without a tracking number.
The concept is a store built around single pieces: each item photographed, sold once and gone, with the artisan who made it named on the page.
How we ran it
Each step was owned by one discipline, and every one of them worked from the same plan in the same team.
- 01
Ecommerce
A store for one-of-a-kind stock
Every listing is a single piece that closes the moment it sells, with the artisan’s name and the hours it took to make. Prices show in pounds, dirhams, dollars and taka, and checkout takes international cards.
- 02
App Development
Listing from the workshop floor
A phone app for the workshop manager to photograph a finished piece, fill in four fields and publish it, so the store is stocked by the people making the stock rather than by a web team.
- 03
SQA, Deployment
Ready for a sale weekend
Load tests for a sale-weekend traffic spike, and checks that two buyers can never pay for the same quilt at the same moment.
More work
Other projects, run the same way: one team under one plan.
