A Design Studio For Signature Styles
Signature Styles LLC is a family-run custom apparel shop in Albuquerque and Rio Rancho — screen print, DTF and embroidery, one shirt or two hundred. Owner Kenny Edelen had no website at all, just a Facebook page. He wanted customers to be able to design their own gear and place the order online. CheatCode Solutions built the whole thing: a live layered design studio, a real order pipeline that prices itself on the server, and an owner portal to run it from.
He had a Facebook page. That was the whole website.
Plenty of good shops run this way. The work is excellent, the customers are loyal, and the entire ordering process happens in comments and DMs. It works until it doesn't — until someone wants to see the product before they ask, or place an order at eleven at night, or send artwork without wondering whether a compressed message attachment is good enough to print.
The brief from Kenny was specific: build the full make, design, customize and order process. Not a brochure with a contact form — the actual flow, on the site, ending in a real order. Payment could wait; connecting the POS could wait. Being able to design a shirt and order it could not.
The design studio is the whole build
Pick a product, pick a color, pick a placement — front center, left chest or back full. Then design. Upload your own art, add text layers, or start from a quick-start layout like a team arch, a circle badge, a script name or a jersey number, and make it yours from there.
Every layer is live on the product. Drag to move, corner handle to resize, top handle to rotate, arrow keys to nudge, undo and redo the whole stack. Each placement keeps its own layers, so you design the front, switch to Back Full, and design that too — the front doesn't vanish. There's zoom, centering, alignment guides, a downloadable proof and a share link that reloads the design later.
- Layered canvas editor — move, scale, rotate and reorder, with undo and redo
- Separate layer stacks per placement: front center, left chest, back full
- PNG, JPG, SVG and WEBP uploads, with the original kept at full resolution for print
- Quick-start layouts so a customer with no design still gets somewhere
- An "I need design help" path for the ones who'd rather describe it
- Proof download and a share link that restores the whole design
The browser never decides the price
A product configurator that trusts the front end is a configurator waiting to be edited in devtools. When an order lands here, the server throws away the numbers the page showed and rebuilds them: it recomputes the total from the live catalog, re-validates the promo code, re-checks stock at that exact moment, and computes the ready-by estimate before a single record is written.
Sizes carry their own rules — extended sizes add their upcharge server-side — and the whole order is bounded so a malformed or hostile submission can't become a ten-thousand-piece problem. The customer's art is stored at full resolution for print, and the shop's copy of the order arrives with everything already priced and confirmed.
An owner portal, not a spreadsheet
Kenny runs the shop from a real login: orders as they arrive with the print-ready art attached, catalog and pricing, stock, and promo codes he controls himself. Art files are served through short-lived signed URLs rather than sitting in a public bucket, and the login endpoint throttles repeat attempts instead of standing wide open to guessing.
Customers get the other half of it: a privacy-gated order tracker that needs the order number plus a matching detail before it will say anything, so a valid order number alone doesn't leak somebody else's order.
Built so the POS can arrive later
Card processing and POS integration were explicitly phase two. The site is built so that's a connection, not a rebuild: promo validation already lives behind one shared endpoint that a future POS can call, pricing and stock already resolve server-side against a live catalog, and orders already carry structured line items rather than a blob of form text.
Today the site captures the complete order and emails both the shop and the customer, and the money conversation happens with a human. When Kenny's ready for online payment, the front end doesn't change.
A shop that had no website now takes designed, priced, print-ready orders at any hour — with the art at full resolution, the pricing computed on the server, and the owner running it all from his own portal.
What the build does
Questions, answered
Can you build a custom product designer, not just a store page?
Yes. Signature Styles has a real design studio: pick the product and color, choose a placement, upload art or add text and graphic layers, then drag, resize, rotate and reorder every layer with undo and redo. Front and back each hold their own layers. It is hand-written canvas code, not a plugin, so it does exactly what the shop needs and nothing it does not.
How do you stop a customer editing prices in the browser?
The browser never sets the price. When an order is submitted, the server recomputes the whole total from the live catalog, re-validates any promo code, re-checks stock at that moment, and calculates the ready-by estimate before anything is saved or emailed. Whatever the page displayed is treated as a suggestion, not a source of truth.
Can a site take orders without taking payment online?
That was the brief. Kenny wanted the full make, design, customize and order flow on the site, with pricing and timeline confirmed by a human before anything runs. So the site captures the complete order including print-ready art and emails the shop and the customer, and payment stays a conversation. Card processing and POS connect later without rebuilding the front end.
Keep going
Tell us what you are building
CheatCode Solutions is Brady Smith in Rio Rancho, writing the code and taking the calls. Most builds ship in two to four weeks with hosting, SSL and support included, and no contract.