Hi'iaka Florist

Overview

Hi'iaka Florist is a Hawaiian floral studio in San Francisco making lei and tropical arrangements to order. The site is live at hiiakaflorist.com, with a customer-facing storefront and an owner-facing console, designed and built end to end.

The Problem

Every piece is made by hand for one person and one occasion, so there is no catalogue to buy from. That makes the usual commerce problem the wrong problem. The difficulty is not checkout, it is specification. Someone has to describe a thing that does not exist yet, to a maker who cannot show it to them first, and both sides have to believe they are talking about the same thing.

The Design Studio

The studio turns the description into something visible. A customer picks the occasion, the product family and the flowers that matter to them, or asks for a surprise. The system composes the brief, generates a photographic vision of the piece, and writes a short passage describing it in the studio's own voice.

The screen is deliberate about what it claims. It says "one possible vision" and "this is inspiration, not a blueprint", and the two actions offered are to start a conversation with the maker or to try again. It sets an expectation rather than taking an order, which is the honest position for bespoke work.

The vision is attached to the enquiry, so the buyer and the maker are looking at the same picture before any money or time is committed.

Storefront and Console

The customer side covers the range: more than twenty five lei varieties across orchid, carnation, ti and ribbon, candy, money and haku, plus tropical arrangements, centrepieces, gift baskets and seasonal work. One form handles all four product families with occasion, date, quantity and notes.

The owner side is an admin console for products and orders, with a Kanban view of work in progress. Orders are written to the database first and then notified, so a mail failure cannot lose a customer.

Technology Stack

Status

Live at hiiakaflorist.com and noveltyleis.com. Orders and enquiries arrive by email to the studio. Payment is deliberately not wired: for made-to-order work the conversation comes before the transaction.