What we built

Mara & Field is a Lagos-based botanical skincare studio that wanted a presence without a checkout flow. The founder did not want a Shopify, did not want a cart, did not want a CMS. She wanted to keep selling on WhatsApp and Instagram and have the back-office stop swallowing her mornings.

So we wired one.

The brief

The studio was already doing good business through DMs but the founder was spending 11pm to 1am every weekday answering messages, logging orders by hand, chasing abandoned carts on a Google Sheet, and reordering raw materials by guesswork. The ask:

• Keep WhatsApp and Instagram as the primary checkout
• Stop manual order logging
• Recover abandoned carts without typing a thing
• See stock, revenue, and ops on one screen each morning
• Do not introduce a website that demands a checkout flow

What is in the box

• Marketing site in Astro 5, no checkout, no signup, just a long-scroll product story with WhatsApp CTAs preloaded by product
• n8n automation layer running on a small Hetzner VPS, handling order intake, message classification, payment confirmation, dispatch handoff, and stock decrement
• Live Ops Console (the killer section) that visualizes a frozen Tuesday morning: live order feed, KPI tiles, inventory bars with low-stock badges, cart recovery widget
• Cart-recovery flow that fires a WhatsApp DM 30 minutes after a quoted basket goes silent, with the cart link prefilled
• Daily summary sent to the founder at 8am with revenue, packing queue, low-stock items, and reblend timing
• Refill program triggered by photo-of-empty-bottle on WhatsApp, no cards or accounts

The killer mechanic

Every demo in the /work portfolio shows a different conversion mechanic. Mara & Field’s is a frozen-in-time ops console the visitor watches running. KPIs, a scrolling order feed across Lagos neighborhoods, inventory bars depleting, cart recovery events firing. The dashboard sits inside a long-scroll product page so the visitor reads it as evidence of an automation that already works, not a demo.

This is the inverse of a typical “checkout-flow” e-commerce site. The conversion happens in WhatsApp. The site exists to say “the studio is real, the system runs, you can join the routine.”

Stack

• Astro 5 + Tailwind 3 (static, deployed on Cloudflare Pages)
• Fraunces (display) + DM Sans (body) + DM Mono (labels)
• Sage / cream / ink palette tuned for botanical premium-indie register
• Self-hosted n8n on a $5 Hetzner VPS for the automation layer
• WhatsApp Business API for messaging
• Paystack for pay links

Why this matters

A small DTC brand in Lagos does not need an enterprise stack. It needs a website that closes the trust gap, a WhatsApp number that does the actual selling, and an automation layer that keeps the founder out of the inbox at 1am. Mara & Field is what that looks like end-to-end.