E-commerce2025
Terrakotta Studio
A headless online shop for a Porto ceramics studio that sells out its limited editions in days.
- Client
- Terrakotta Studio, Porto
- Role
- Headless storefront development
- Year
- 2025
- Services
- E-commerce development
- Headless architecture
- Waiting list system
- Performance
- Stack
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- Shopify Storefront API
- Tailwind CSS
- Vercel
Overview
Terrakotta is a two-person ceramics studio in Porto making sculptural vases in small, numbered editions. Their old template shop buckled every time a new edition dropped, and it made one-of-a-kind pieces look like catalogue items.
The challenge
Editions of twenty pieces sell out within hours, so the store had to survive sharp traffic spikes, never sell the same piece twice and turn sold-out items into a waiting list rather than a dead end.
The approach
I built a headless storefront on Shopify with Next.js, rendering product pages statically and revalidating them the moment stock changes. Each piece is reserved for ten minutes at checkout so nothing is oversold, and sold-out pieces switch to a one-tap waiting list that emails customers when the next edition opens.
Outcome
The result
The new shop launched in October 2025 and handled its first drop of 1,800 visitors in ten minutes without slowing down. The first three editions sold out online in under a week.
- online revenue year on year
- 3.1x
- visitors in the first ten minutes of a drop
- 1,800
- oversold pieces since launch
- 0
Drop days used to mean refunds and apologies. Now the shop just works, and our waiting list has become our best sales channel.
