Space Pocket: a reserve-online, pay-at-pickup squishy shop

Space Pocket is a small Toronto shop selling squishies and fidget toys to teens, tweens and their parents. Customers browse the Catalogue, reserve online, and meet the seller at Sherbourne subway station, where they inspect their items, pay in cash and sign the handover on their own phone. Around the shop sit a 122-article blog (the Space Journal), customer reviews, member accounts and Mission Control, a private dashboard that runs the business day to day.

Most e-commerce assumes online payment and shipping. Space Pocket needed the opposite: no card payments, no addresses, cash only, all sales final, and many customers under 18. That meant designing a sale that's trustworthy for both sides without a payment processor: reservations that hold stock without selling it, a clear record of what was handed over and paid, protection against no-shows, and careful handling of minors' data. On top of that, the brand had to feel like a glossy, magical space adventure, not a template store, and look good on phones first.

I designed and built the whole product: brand look, homepage experience, storefront, member area, admin dashboard, database and emails, directing the development with Claude Code.

The homepage opens with a cinematic intro I produced from AI-generated clips, cut and colour-matched so its final frame hands over seamlessly to the live page. There, the squishies and the astronaut are separate animated layers that float and react to every tap, and the navigation is seven glowing planet bubbles over the artwork.

The core of the shop is the pickup flow. A reservation holds stock without reducing it, and expired reservations are held until they're checked and released. At pickup, the customer answers inspection questions and types their legal name in their own account. The database decides whether an answer is a problem, signing is only possible after the seller confirms the cash, and a versioned acknowledgement and PDF are stored for both sides. Totals use Canadian 5¢ cash rounding, and every time is shown in Toronto time.

Security is enforced in the database rather than in the interface: row-level security on every table, admin checks inside the database, column-level permissions so members can only edit their own details, and signed orders that can never be edited or deleted. All 21 schema changes are versioned migrations, each reviewed before it was run.