A premium glassware brand I designed and built end to end — the name, the identity, the storefront, the photography, and the code. One person, every layer.
Flow3r is a premium cannabis glassware brand — bongs, dab rigs, grinders, rolling trays. I built the whole thing solo: the brand from a blank page, the Shopify storefront in code, the product photography, and the launch strategy. It's a real, live 0→1 product, not a class brief.
The smoking-accessories space is crowded with cluttered, corny, cash-grab shops. I wanted Flow3r to feel like the opposite — calm, premium, and considered, closer to a design-object brand like Puffco than a head shop. The constraints made it harder: a small launch catalog, near-zero starting capital, and a category that ad platforms and payment processors treat with suspicion. Every decision had to earn trust on a tight budget.
After a long naming exploration I landed on Flow3r — the "3" standing in for the "E." It keeps the natural, easygoing feel of the word while giving it a quiet, ownable twist that looks sharp in a wordmark.
From there I built the system: a deep forest green, a near-black backdrop for that premium gallery feel, soft sage and cream for contrast, and Outfit as the typeface — clean and modern without trying too hard. I cut every corny convention along the way: no "lifestyle supply" taglines, no "new drops every Friday," nothing that hinted at how it's fulfilled.
Launching with a small, curated catalog, a standard e-commerce grid would have looked empty and cheap. So I designed the shop as an editorial lookbook — an alternating two-column layout that gives each category room to breathe and feel intentional, like pages in a magazine rather than rows in a store.
Cat Bongs (the signature piece, tied to a shelter-donation), Beaker Bongs, Dab Rigs, Rolling Trays, Grinders — curated, not endless.
Pulled "concentrate" out of every user-facing surface and wrote SEO copy with a clean heading hierarchy, alt text, and structured data.
An age gate and a cart drawer that never break, a Glass Guide for newcomers, and Essentials / Reserve tiers to frame the range.
Smile.io rewards (Seedling → Sapling → Flow3r tiers) and Judge.me reviews to earn repeat trust.
Reflective, transparent glass is one of the hardest things to photograph well — and I needed a whole catalog to look identical. I built a budget studio around that problem: a white seamless paper sweep, lit with CRI-95 continuous softboxes, with black foamboard negative fill to carve clean, defined dark edges into the glass.
In post, I mask each piece and drop the exact brand sage behind it — so every shot in the catalog shares one perfectly consistent background. The result reads premium and uniform, the Puffco-style look, on a starter budget.
Flow3r runs on a custom Shopify theme I built in Liquid — not a bought template. I worked across the Shopify CLI and AI-assisted "vibe coding" to build the editorial templates, then documented the whole brand in a context file (colors, voice, catalog tiers, hard rules like "never break the age gate or cart drawer") so the build stayed consistent as it grew. Designing directly in code meant the final site matched the intent exactly, instead of drifting between mockup and reality.
Owning the build end to end is the difference between designing a store and actually shipping one.
This category fights you on marketing. Paid platforms restrict cannabis-adjacent ads, so I planned an organic-first approach — TikTok and Instagram, where the aesthetic does the work — before any spend. When paid does come in, the creative and the storefront both lean on policy-safe framing ("water pipes," "glass art," pieces shot as design objects), since the platforms review the landing page too, not just the ad. A phased budget keeps testing cheap until something proves itself.
Flow3r is the project where I stopped being only a screen designer. I owned brand, UX, copy, photography, and code, and had to keep them coherent across a whole catalog with real constraints — compliance, budget, platform policy — shaping every call.
It's the clearest proof I have that I can take something from a blank page all the way to a live product people can actually buy from — and make it feel considered the entire way down.
Brand, storefront, photography, and code — all one person.
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