Organize My Drawer
Organize My Drawer lets customers design custom, laser-cut acrylic organizers for any drawer in their home. Built on Drupal, this application serves up a web-based design tool that converts customer designs into cut files for the factory's laser cutters.
- End-to-end process built on Drupal Commerce, with payments through Authorize.Net
- Custom pricing calculated from each customer's own build
- A browser-based design tool, heavily JavaScript-driven with extensive AJAX, for building layouts to a customer's own drawer dimensions
- Finished designs converted into cut files for the factory's laser cutters
- Customized back-office tools and workflows for factory production
About this project
The challenge
Organize My Drawer sells custom laser-cut acrylic organizers, which means the product does not exist until the customer designs it. That breaks the assumption underneath most ecommerce. There is no catalog of fixed items to choose from, no inventory to draw down, and no stock price to look up, because every order is specified by one customer's drawer dimensions and their own arrangement of inserts and compartments. The order also cannot end at payment the way a normal one does: somebody in the factory still has to cut the thing, so the design has to leave the website as manufacturing instructions rather than as a line on a packing slip.
What we built
The design tool runs in the browser. A customer enters the dimensions of their own drawer and builds up a layout of compartments and inserts, watching it take shape as they go. It is heavily JavaScript-driven, with extensive AJAX between the browser and Drupal, so the server holds and checks the design as it takes shape. Checkout runs on Drupal Commerce with payments through Authorize.Net, and a custom pricing system works the price out from the build the customer has configured, since there is no catalog entry to price against. On the other side of the sale, the finished design is converted into cut files for the factory's laser cutters, and we built back-office tools and production workflows around that so factory staff work from the orders themselves instead of re-entering them somewhere else.
The result
A customer can specify something that has never existed before, pay for it, and have the factory receive a file it can cut, with nobody in the middle translating a drawing into manufacturing instructions by hand. The site is the front end of a production process rather than a storefront in front of a warehouse, which is the harder version of ecommerce and the reason so much of this one is custom.
Built with
- Drupal
- Drupal Commerce
- Authorize.Net payment processing
- Custom JavaScript design tool
- AJAX-driven configuration
- Custom pricing engine driven by the configured build
- Automated cut file generation
- Custom back-office production workflows
- Manufacturing integration