Client work / Case study 01
Dhaka, Bangladesh
A proper shop for
very small things.
An online shop and portfolio for a model-making studio that builds architectural, industrial and corporate models, and handmade rooms, bookshelves and keepsakes.
- Client
- Miniature By Minion
- Location
- Dhaka, Bangladesh
- Sector
- Model making & gifts
- Scope
- Design, build, hosting set-up
- Year
- 2026
01 — The brief
From Facebook posts to a real shop
Miniature By Minion is a model-making studio in Dhaka. They build architectural, industrial, real-estate and corporate models for businesses, and handmade rooms, bookshelves and keepsakes for people who love small things.
The studio sold almost entirely through Facebook posts and messages. They needed a shop customers across Bangladesh could order from with the payment methods they already use, a way for overseas buyers and businesses to ask for quotes, and an admin simple enough to run from a phone.
Contact sheet · The studio’s work
20 frames
01Factory campus, full model 
02A whole room under one hand 
03Tree bookshelf 
04From above: sheds, offices and grounds 
05Books that fit in a palm 
06Café table and chairs 
07Working on the factory model 
08A microscope 
09Blue-clad sheds with red trim 
10A chair beside a fingertip 
11An office, with printer and filing 
12Shelves before paint 
13A wrestling ring 
14Landscaped pond and planting 
15Arched bookcase 
16A bookcase, primed white 
17A bookshelf held in two fingers 
18Arranging a study room 
19A study corner 
20Hundreds of printed books
02 — What we built
Built for how Bangladesh buys
Storefront & CMS in one app
Next.js with Payload CMS running inside the same app: products, categories, orders, custom requests and completed works, all managed from one admin.
Local payments
Cash on delivery, bKash and Nagad. Mobile-money orders carry the customer’s transaction ID and wait as “awaiting verification” until staff check them.
Two currencies, one price list
Prices are stored in taka. Visitors outside Bangladesh see US dollars by default, from the host’s country header, and anyone can switch.
International quotes
Orders from abroad are saved as invoices, so staff can quote shipping and payment before anything is charged.
Custom commissions
A request form for architectural models and one-off pieces, saved straight into the admin.
Fast on mobile data
Images are generated at three WebP sizes on upload, and Facebook reels only load when a visitor taps them.
Tamper-proof checkout
The basket lives in the browser, but the server looks every product up again and recalculates the total.
Near-zero running cost
Designed for free or low-cost tiers: Vercel, a Turso database and Cloudflare R2 for media.
03 — The design
Drawn like a set of plans.
The site is drawn like a set of model-maker’s plans: numbered sheets, title blocks, graph paper and elevations, with headings in English and Bangla.
It suits a studio whose best-paid work is architectural models, and it lets tiny product photos look deliberate — framed like prints on a contact sheet rather than stretched to fill a banner.
Sheet 07 · About the studio
Scale 1:12
A small workshop for very small things.
ছোট্ট জিনিসের ছোট্ট কারখানা
- Studio
- Miniature By Minion
- Workshop
- Dhaka
- Ships
- Across Bangladesh
- Abroad
- On quote
Recreation of a page header from the client’s site
04 — Under the bonnet
One app, low running costs
- Next.js
- React
- TypeScript
- Tailwind CSS
- Payload CMS 3
- SQLite / Turso
- Cloudflare R2
- Vercel
The shop and its admin live in one Next.js app, with Payload CMS inside it. The database is SQLite locally and Turso in production — the same adapter, so nothing changes between the two — and uploaded media goes to Cloudflare R2. For a small studio, the whole thing runs on free or near-free tiers.
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