CLOUZE

CLOUZE is a Sri Lankan clothing brand I started with three friends in 2025. I was the only engineer, so every technical decision from the storefront to checkout ended up on my desk.

We launched on a headless platform I'd already built, a Vendure backend with a custom Next.js storefront, which I adapted and ran through our first drops. I also handled the unglamorous side: inventory, order tracking, keeping the store alive while a drop went out. Eventually the maintenance cost of a custom stack stopped making sense for a business our size, so I did a proper build-vs-buy comparison and moved everything to Shopify.

The hardest call was walking away from my own code. I'm glad I built it, since that's how I actually learned commerce infrastructure, but keeping it alive was costing the business more than it gave back.

The brand eventually wound down. That was a customer-acquisition problem, not a technical one. What I kept is a very concrete sense of what it costs to build, run, and retire production infrastructure, because I've now done all three for something real.