Don't reinvent the wheel.

The fork in the road.

ToyCar Showroom needed two parallel things. One was an e-commerce platform of the kind every store online has been running for the last decade. Cart, catalog, checkout, an admin to manage prices, taxes, the rest. The other was a feature called the personal garage, a place a collector logs in and finds the shape of their own taste reflected back. That part did not exist anywhere yet.

A consultancy with one quarter to ship both has exactly one decision worth making before any code is written. Which side gets built from scratch, and which side comes off the shelf.

The wheel is a wheel.

Adding items to a cart. Taking payments. Managing a product catalog. Exporting an order. None of this is novel work in 2026, and a consultant who treats it as novel is mostly running up an invoice.

Mature open source has solved each of these problems in code, in public, under licences that let you ship the same day. The only honest reason to write a checkout from scratch this decade is if you are in the business of selling checkouts.

Why Medusa.

I picked Medusa, an open-source headless commerce framework, as the foundation. Headless meant the storefront stayed mine. The brand and the page-by-page design were not pinned to a template store. Composable meant the unusual surfaces could plug into the platform without bending it out of shape, the garage being the first of those.

A diagram of restraint.

The diagram is the post. Below the line is everything other people have spent years building, configuring, and testing already. Above the line is what the founder is paying me to build, and what makes the store recognisable as theirs.

Where the engineering actually went.

All the hours that did not go into a cart went into the garage. The collector profile shape does not map cleanly onto a normal customer record. The showcase view had to feel like looking into a glass cabinet rather than scrolling a product grid. Wishlist semantics had to fit a buyer who collects rather than someone who buys and forgets. The onboarding flow had to make a first-time visitor want a garage of their own before they had bought anything at all.

The discipline.

When a founder hires a consultant, they are not paying for novelty about the boring parts. They are paying for the judgement to see which parts are boring, and the restraint to walk past them. Ship the differentiator. Configure everything else.