01
Story-first product pages
Artisan profiles and an editorial journal sit alongside the catalog so every item is framed by the person who made it — merchandising and narrative in the same layout.
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Ashenda
A cultural-commerce marketplace for 240 Tigrayan women artisans — a full Next.js storefront engineered to tell every maker's story while it sells.
Ashenda visual
Overview
Ashenda is commerce with a mission: give 240 Tigrayan women artisans a global storefront. I built the full Next.js experience — a multi-currency catalog, artisan profiles, an editorial journal, events and a complete cart/checkout — fast and image-rich enough to do justice to handmade work.
The Challenge
What made it hard.
A marketplace built around craft can't look like a generic e-commerce template. Each product carries a maker's story, and that story is the reason people buy — yet the site still had to perform like a modern storefront with real checkout.
Selling across borders meant pricing in multiple currencies and staying fast despite a deeply image-heavy catalog.
Approach
How I solved it.
02
Real commerce, multi-currency
A full catalog with multi-currency pricing, cart and checkout — the storefront behaves like a proper shop, not a lookbook.
03
Fast despite the imagery
Next.js image optimization and careful loading keep a photo-dense catalog quick on any connection — the visuals sell without slowing the sale.
What I Built
Shipped in the box.
- ✓Multi-currency product catalog with cart & checkout
- ✓Artisan profile pages connecting makers to their work
- ✓Editorial journal and events for community storytelling
- ✓Image-optimized, responsive Next.js storefront
- ✓CMS-driven content so the team can publish without a developer
Outcome
Where it landed.
240
Artisans onboarded
Multi
Currency checkout
Live
In production
Have something like this to build?
I build AI-native SaaS, healthcare products, marketplaces and internal platforms from first commit to launch.