A custom storefront wired straight into Stripe: your brand, your data, your domain. No Shopify, no monthly platform tax. Built for the Poway operators who sell a real product: a part, a kit, a branded run, a small line off the shop floor.
Poway is fifty thousand people built around aerospace, defense contracting, and the manufacturing that orbits both. Most of that work is service and contract, not retail, so the honest read is that ecommerce is a narrow fit here. But narrow is not none. Inside that base sit the operators who do ship product: a small manufacturer with a line of parts or kits that engineers reorder, a fabrication shop selling a branded tool or fixture, a family business that built a following around one physical thing and keeps fielding "can I just buy it online" emails.
Those operators rarely need a marketplace. They need a clean way for a known buyer to reorder a known part, or for a new customer to buy the one product without a sales call. Drop that into Shopify and you're renting a consumer-retail platform to do a job it was never shaped for: variants you don't have, a theme that screams boutique when the buyer is a procurement person with a card, monthly fees on top of the processing you'd pay anyway.
Stripe-direct fits the actual shape of the work. Stripe moves the money. The catalog, the reorder flow, the part-number search, the net-terms note if you need one, the receipt that doubles as a record for the buyer's books: all written around how Poway operators actually sell. You pay the processing fee and nothing else. No platform layer skimming a business that already runs on tight margins.
A Poway small manufacturer with a reorder line. A run of fixtures or kits that the same shops buy again and again. The store is built for reorder speed (part number, quantity, done) with inventory that shows the real count and a receipt formatted to drop straight into the buyer's expense system. Stripe takes the card. No consumer-retail theme pretending this is a boutique.
A fabrication shop selling one branded product. A tool, a bracket, a mount the shop designed and now sells nationally off word of mouth. One deep product page: the spec, the material, the install, a voice memo from the maker transcribed under the photos. Out-of-state buyers, mostly. Checkout is one screen. The brand the shop earned in the trade carries straight through to the confirmation email.
A Garden Road family business with a product following. A dozen SKUs the family is known for locally and increasingly shipped beyond Poway. Local pickup is a checkout option for the regulars; the rest ships. The whole shop matches the family's brand instead of a rented theme, and we hand the keys to whoever runs the counter.
This works when there's a real product, a small catalog to design around, and an operator who wants the code in their own account. It does not work for a thousand-variant inventory, a full warehouse or ERP system, marketplace seller logins, or a wall of apps. If your business is genuinely service-and-contract with no product to ship, a shop is the wrong build and we'll tell you that on the first call instead of selling you one.
Studio HQ is in San Diego, reachable inland in about forty-five minutes. In-person at the shop in Old Poway or the business park when a build warrants seeing the actual product. The rest runs remote. The handoff lands on your domain, with your Stripe keys, with the source in a repository you own. One person doing the work. That's the point of the price and the speed.
One paragraph about your business is enough. Tell us what you need → Or just email hola@xala.studio.