freddy came to me with an idea, not a product — no existing site, no mvp to iterate on. he'd noticed that nonprofit merch tends to be scattered across dozens of separate stores (squarespace shops, bonfire campaigns, and everything in between), and that people are often more motivated to buy something when it's both genuinely useful to them and tied to a cause they care about, rather than a straight donation ask alone. his idea: one marketplace that aggregates merch from many different nonprofits and lets shoppers browse and filter by the cause that matters to them.

this was a solo project end to end — i owned both the design and the full build, working directly with freddy from the initial idea through launch. since arelia was an early-stage venture and freddy was intentional about not over-investing in infrastructure before it was actually needed, i made a deliberate call: rather than reaching for an off-the-shelf headless cms, i built a lightweight, purpose-scoped custom admin system — nothing more than the marketplace actually required. i hand-manage the catalog directly as part of an ongoing engagement, which keeps the system simple and lets me make sure new nonprofits and products get onboarded cleanly.

the real technical challenge was giving shoppers one consistent browsing experience across products that don't actually live on arelia at all — each nonprofit sells through its own separate platform, each with a completely different page structure and image hosting setup. rather than trying to normalize or re-host every nonprofit's assets, i pull each product's real image url directly from its source page and store it as a column in a postgres products table (via supabase), then feed that straight into next/image. every product displays consistently in arelia's grid regardless of where it actually lives — and clicking through sends the shopper straight to the nonprofit's own store to complete the purchase. arelia never touches the transaction itself, which keeps the system lightweight and ensures 100% of the purchase goes directly to the nonprofit.

arelia launched with 14 verified nonprofits and 100+ products live on day one, aggregated into a single, fast browsing experience — pagespeed scores sit in the high 90s site-wide. freddy brought me on for ongoing maintenance and catalog management after launch, which has kept this an active, evolving project rather than a one-off build.

“hrishav was a delight to work with - extremely responsive, and was able to walk me through the more technical aspects without any issues. he even made a video tutorial to help me manage the back-end of things on my own! From first contacting me through my reddit post, to the final delivery of my portfolio site, hrishav was a consummate professional and helped me build exactky what i wanted. i would absolutely contact him again if i needed to build a different website or upgrade my current one.”

not every early-stage product needs enterprise infrastructure. a custom, purpose-built admin system — scoped tightly to what the business actually needed at this stage — got arelia to market in four weeks without carrying unnecessary overhead, while leaving room to grow into something heavier later if the catalog and traffic ever call for it.