Zieck.eu.
A personal apparel brand, built and run end-to-end. Brand identity, photography direction, custom Next.js storefront, payments, fulfilment emails and a CRM for return customers, all under one last name.
/ at a glance
What was built.
- 01Custom Next.js storefront, no Shopify, no platform tax. Cart, checkout, order state and inventory all live in the same codebase.
- 02Mollie for EU-native payments (iDEAL, Bancontact, SEPA, cards) without the US-payments tax.
- 03Resend and FluentCRM for transactional and marketing email, fed from the same customer record.
- 04Story-driven collections rooted in Curaçaose memories (Patu, Lisimbein, Peeling Paint, Music Journey), each with its own art direction.
01 / problem
The brief.
Most apparel brands hand the shop away to Shopify and live with whatever it gives them. That trade is fine, until you want the storefront to feel like the brand, not like every other DTC brand. The challenge: build a custom storefront that's as reliable as Shopify, costs less, and feels unmistakably mine.
02 / approach
How I worked it.
- 01
Designed the brand first: palette, type, photography direction, tone of voice for product copy. The storefront is downstream of the brand, not the other way around.
- 02
Built the shop in the same Next.js stack as the rest of my work: App Router, Server Components for product pages (great for SEO and crawl), Server Actions for cart mutations.
- 03
Picked an EU-first payments and email stack so the fees and the deliverability both make sense for a Dutch-shipping brand.
- 04
Each collection gets its own narrative page, a small editorial layer above the catalogue, so the shop reads like a magazine that happens to sell clothes.
03 / decisions
Forks in the road.
The interesting part of any build is what got picked, what got rejected, and why. Here are the ones that mattered.
/ decision 01
Custom over Shopify
Shopify is the lowest-risk path. It is also a tax on every sale and a ceiling on the design. For a brand where the storefront is the marketing, the lock-in and visual ceiling cost more than the engineering does. Owning the stack also means the next collection page can do whatever it needs to without theme limits.
/ decision 02
Mollie over Stripe
Stripe is the default; for a Dutch brand with mostly Dutch and EU customers, Mollie ships iDEAL and Bancontact natively at lower fees. The integration cost is comparable, and the conversion at checkout is noticeably better when shoppers see the payment method they actually use.
/ decision 03
Resend for transactional, FluentCRM for marketing
One tool that does both is tempting; in practice, transactional and marketing have different deliverability profiles and different billing models. Splitting them keeps order confirmations out of the promo bucket and keeps the marketing list portable.
/ by the numbers
Orders shipped
30+
Collections live
4
Platform fees
€0
Built solo
100%
Where it lands.
Live at zieck.eu, shipping orders across the EU. Four collections out the door so far (Patu, Lisimbein, Peeling Paint, Music Journey), each with its own art direction. The custom storefront has held through every launch without a platform tax taking a bite.
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