Biotech · B2B commerce
STR Technologies
A vaccine-adjuvant supplier's entire customer-facing store, built solo from the ground up for a market that buys on trust.
STR sells vaccine adjuvants to the pharmaceutical industry: research institutions and manufacturers, not retail. It's an established, conservative market, slow to trust anyone new. The client, based in China and Singapore, was entering it cold, with no store, no brand, and no obvious reason for a research buyer to take a first order seriously. My job was the whole customer-facing side of the business, built from nothing: the proposition a technical buyer meets, and everything underneath it that has to feel settled before they will.
The foundation came before the store
Before there was anything to sell, I built a design system. It covers the writing style, colour, typography, the logo and iconography, and a set of reusable components, and it lives as its own published styleguide rather than as notes in a file. Working this way means the store inherits a settled visual language instead of inventing one page by page. For a company trying to look established on day one, that consistency does quiet work: nothing on the site looks improvised, because none of it is.
See the design system →Knowing who actually buys an adjuvant
A research buyer doesn't shop the way a retail customer does. They arrive knowing the compound, the grade, and the question they need answered, with little patience for a storefront that treats them like a browser. So the personas went into the design system itself. I studied the people the site is really for and wrote them down as avatars: a senior vaccine researcher who needs high-purity, batch-consistent material with full GMP documentation; a procurement manager who needs audit-ready COA and SDS, and reliable international shipping. That work shaped the language, the way products are described, and what each page leads with.
One operator, running the whole Shopify operation
Shopify was the platform decision early on, and it held for an unusual reason: over the past year it's become an e-commerce platform an AI agent can actually operate. Its CLI is built to be scripted, its dev toolkit checks every API call against the live schema before anything ships, and an MCP server lets Claude Code read Shopify's own documentation mid-build. I use Claude Code to run the store end to end, not just to write the theme.
That changes what the build looks like day to day. Products don't get typed into the Shopify admin one by one; they come from a single spreadsheet Claude turns into store content. The person managing the catalogue never touches Shopify's raw backend — they work through an admin layer built specifically to shield them, with a Draft-to-Live step so nothing goes live by accident. Pricing, documents and checkout stay hidden until Shopify itself confirms a buyer as an approved business, not a casual visitor. And every deploy needs a version tag and a clean git history behind it, closer to a software release than a typical theme update.
The point isn't that it's automated. It's that the whole operation stays small enough for one operator to actually hold. That's the only way a solo build of this scope stays maintainable, and the only way the client isn't left dependent on a developer for every change.
Earning trust as the new name in the room
Everything above serves one problem: a new supplier in this market has to look like it has been here a while. The hero reads "Reliable Adjuvants. Consistent Results." because reliability and consistency are exactly what a procurement buyer checks for, and the rest of the site is built to back that up rather than just claim it. The restraint is deliberate. In a market that distrusts noise, looking calm and finished is more persuasive than looking eager.
STR is live as a prototype and still moving. The storefront runs with real products, the design system is published and in use, and the build-and-run architecture is doing the work it was made for. It's the work of one person, which is the point: a complete customer-facing proposition for a regulated market, foundations first, kept light enough to run from a single desk. There's more to do before it's a finished store, and that's the honest state of it.