How I Built Zarwani

Zarwani is my wife's business — gift-wrapping and decorative-items, sold on Amazon and WhatsApp, now scaling to the US. She needed a proper website: something that looked like a real brand, not a marketplace listing. I vibe-coded it for her.

I started from a free, open-source Next.js e-commerce template rather than building the plumbing from zero — product grid, category pages, the basic shape of a storefront were already there. The actual work was making it Zarwani's: real product photography, real copy, a palette and layout that felt like a gifting brand instead of a boilerplate demo.

I skipped a full backend on purpose. There's no cart, no payment gateway built into the site — sales happen on Amazon and over WhatsApp, so the site's job is to look good, explain the products properly, and make it easy to get in touch. The contact form is intentionally lightweight: it posts straight to a Google Sheet instead of standing up a database and an email service for a handful of enquiries a week.

I also wrote a couple of short product guides — how to use shredded paper confetti for gift packaging, how Korean-style waterproof wrapping paper holds up on a bouquet — partly for search, partly because customers actually ask these questions.

Building for one real, demanding customer who happens to be your wife is its own kind of product school. She tells me immediately when something doesn't work. There's no polite Slack message softening the feedback.