Near and Native
Bespoke order processing tool for shipping 20K+ candles a year.
A high-volume candle maker was running its entire order flow through a single shared Apple Note. Northwoods replaced it with a central hub that pulls every order in automatically — live for the whole team in three weeks.
- The clear picture
- Every order lands in one hub on its own. Anyone can see where it stands, what's next, and who has it.
- Capabilities
- Order management, Workflow automation, Systems integration
The problem
Near and Native is entering its eighth year, has shipped over 20,000 orders and 165,000+ candles and home fragrance products across Shopify, Faire, and in-person studio sales.
Yet the entire operation ran through one shared Apple Note. Four teammates, working remotely on flexible schedules, copied every order in by hand from each channel. The note glitched between mobile and desktop, lost data, and failed to sync — so updates and task assignments never reached the people who needed them. Orders slipped, daily objectives got missed, and the team had no reliable, remote-accessible source of truth.
What we built
- 01Every order from Shopify, Faire, and the studio shows up automatically — nothing keyed in by hand, nothing missed.
- 02Anyone on the team can open it and see exactly where an order stands, what's next, and who owns it.
- 03Questions that used to become Slack threads or texts now live inside the order itself — assigned, flagged, and visible to everyone.
- 04Pallet arrivals, urgent orders, market updates — one place for the whole team, separate from the work.
How it works
From checkout to packing bench.
Shopify stays the store of record. Every new or edited order arrives by webhook, lands in one database, and becomes a task with a prep checklist. The team works the board — nobody re-keys an order or opens Shopify to find out what’s next.
Shopify
The store of record. Web checkouts, wholesale draft orders and Faire orders all land here.
Orders
customer, totals and the order note
Line items
title, variant, SKU and quantity
Payment status
paid, pending or refunded
Faire & draft orders
Faire syncs into Shopify; draft orders cover direct wholesale
Webhooks
Shopify pings the app the moment an order is created or edited, so the board never waits on a refresh.
Signed events
orders/create and orders/updated, HMAC-verified
Upsert, not append
Shopify IDs as keys, so re-deliveries are safe
Retail or wholesale
draft orders tagged wholesale automatically
Backfill
paginated import of past orders
Postgres
One Neon database: Shopify's data plus everything the team adds.
Orders & line items
mirrored from Shopify, never edited
Tasks
status, assignee, due date and notes
Comments
per order, with @mentions
Studio lists
announcements and the supply shopping list
Task layer
Turns each new order into a job the studio can pick up and finish.
What it creates
a task in New, typed retail or wholesale, ready to assign
Prep checklist
supplies ordered, wicked, poured, labeled, dust covered
Who hears about it
assignees emailed on assignment, status changes and comments
What it protects
the team's notes — Shopify's note is kept separately
Order hub
A React app on Cloudflare, behind Google sign-in.
Orders board
filter by status, assignee, due date and order size
Order detail
checklist, comments, line items and shipping address
Announcements
studio-wide updates with @mentions
Shopping list
supplies tracked from ordered to received
The board reads the database directly, refreshing every 30 seconds.
Around all of it
Guardrails on every request.
Who can get in, what changed, and who needs to know. Admins manage all of it from one settings page.
- Google sign-in
- studio domain plus an admin-managed invite list
- API tokens
- for automations, created and revoked by an admin
- Signed webhooks
- every Shopify payload HMAC-verified before it's read
- Email alerts
- assignees hear about new work, status changes and comments
- Sessions
- 30-day sign-in, cleared the moment someone logs out
Cloudflare Workers · Hono · React · Neon Postgres · Drizzle · Shopify Admin API · Resend
How we worked
Embedded, in three beats.
- 01
Scope
One working session with Hannah to capture the real requirements — after off-the-shelf tools proved too expensive and too rigid to fit how the team actually worked.
- 02
Prototype
A working proof of concept in the team's hands within a week, built around their actual order flow across Shopify, Faire, and the studio.
- 03
Ship
Two weeks of feedback, then a full production rollout to the whole team — three weeks from first meeting to live.
Outcomes
By the numbers.
Near and Native went from a note that crashed and lost data to a hub the whole team relies on every day.
The numbers tell the rest.
- 1 week
- to a working proof of concept in the team's hands
- 3 weeks
- from first meeting to full production rollout
- 0
- manual entry errors, down from a hand-keyed shared note