A custom storefront wired straight into Stripe — your brand, your data, your domain. No Shopify, no monthly platform tax. Built for the Cedros Design District makers and boutique sellers who already trade on taste, not catalog.
Solana Beach is thirteen thousand people and one of the densest pockets of independent design retail in the county. Walk the Cedros Design District and the businesses are furniture studios, ceramicists, a small-batch apparel label, a wellness shop with a tight product line on a back shelf. The product is never the point on its own. The point is whose hand made it, in which studio, and why it costs what it costs. That story is the reason anyone buys, and it is the first thing a generic store template flattens.
Put a Cedros maker on Shopify and the showroom evaporates. The cart drawer slides in from the right looking like every dropshipper's. The product page is the same product page. For a designer who spent a decade earning the right to charge what they charge, the platform itself undercuts the price on every screen. The customer who came for the maker leaves looking at a theme.
Stripe-direct keeps the room intact. Stripe moves the money and nothing else. The layout, the type, the way a single chair photographs across three scrolls, the receipt that reads like a note from the studio — all of it gets written around the work. You pay Stripe's processing fee and not one dollar more. No platform sits in the middle taking a monthly cut of a business that lives on margin.
A Cedros furniture studio with a short, expensive line. Eight pieces, made to order, plus a small run of ready-to-ship accessories. The product page reads like a placard — the wood, the joinery, the lead time, the maker's own words on why the back rakes the way it does. Stripe takes a deposit on the made-to-order pieces and the balance on completion. Local pickup at the Cedros showroom is a checkout option; the rest ships crated. No theme drawer, no app rented to handle a deposit.
A boutique apparel label off the design district. A six-piece seasonal capsule plus a few carry-over staples. Inventory shows the actual count, so the last small in a color reads as the last small, not a phantom. The whole shop matches the brand book — not a Shopify theme with a logo dropped on top. We wire it in under three weeks and hand the keys to the owner.
A wellness studio with a tight retail shelf near the Highlands. A dozen products — a tincture line, a candle, a book the owner keeps recommending. The store sits inside the studio site, not bolted on as a subdomain. Stripe handles the cards, Resend sends a receipt in the studio's voice, and the brand never breaks from the product page to the confirmation email an hour later.
This works when the catalog is small enough to design around, the maker's name carries weight, and the operator wants the code in their own account. It does not work for a thousand-variant inventory, a full warehouse system, marketplace seller logins, or a stack of twenty apps doing twenty things. For that, Shopify Plus is the honest answer and we'll say so before you sign anything.
Studio HQ is in San Diego, inside forty minutes up the coast. Walking the Cedros Design District, seeing the actual pieces, hearing how a maker describes their own line — that's an easy half-day on the ground when a build warrants it. The rest runs remote. The handoff lands on your domain, with your Stripe keys, with the source in a repository you own. One person doing the work. That's the point of the price and the speed.
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