A custom storefront wired straight into Stripe: your brand, your data, your domain. No Shopify, no third-party lock-in. Built for the breweries, biotech merch programs, and surf labels actually shaping San Diego retail.
San Diego retail runs on a particular kind of small operator. A North Park brewery shipping a four-pack of an IPA they cold-canned last Tuesday. A Sorrento Valley biotech with a merch program for the lab: embroidered fleeces, a logo'd bottle, a gift for the post-doc who just defended. A Pacific Beach surf label printing tees out of a garage that doubles as a shaper bay. The product is the side of a much bigger story, and the story is the actual reason anyone buys.
Drop that operator into Shopify and the story shrinks. The header is the same header. The product page is the same product page. The cart drawer slides in from the right and looks like ten thousand other DTC stores you scrolled past this month. For a Little Italy chef selling a chili oil or a Hillcrest queer-owned apparel label printing a six-piece capsule, the platform itself is the leak. It bleeds the brand on every screen.
Stripe-direct keeps the brand intact. Stripe handles money. Everything you actually see (the layout, the typography, the product page, the cart, the checkout, the receipt email that lands an hour later) gets written from scratch around the shop. You pay Stripe's processing fee. You pay nothing else. There is no platform sitting between you and the customer, taking a monthly cut and a piece of every theme update.
A North Park craft brewery shipping DTC. Twelve current beers, a glass, a hat, a t-shirt run from a local printer. The product page reads like a tap-list note: what's in the mash, when it was canned, when the brewer thinks it'll peak. Stripe Tax handles the alcohol-shipping headaches that Shopify apps would otherwise charge for monthly. Inventory shows when the four-pack actually runs out, not three days later. Local pickup at the taproom is one of the shipping options.
A Sorrento Valley biotech with a merch program. A fifteen-SKU internal store: fleeces, water bottles, notebooks, a small line of tees commemorating last summer's milestone. Procurement runs through a finance person who pays by card. The store sits behind a simple gate so it stays internal. Stripe handles the cards. The look matches the company's brand guide exactly, not a Shopify theme with the company logo dropped on top. We wire it in two and a half weeks, hand the keys to the office manager, and she ships from a closet behind the lab.
A Pacific Beach surf label out of a garage shaper bay. Six tees, two hoodies, a wax-and-tee combo, and a limited-run hand-shaped shortboard. The board has its own deep page: outline drawing, fin setup, the shaper's voice memo transcribed under the photos. Out-of-state customers, mostly. The checkout takes one screen. The receipt looks like a letter, not a transaction. The brand never breaks from product page to confirmation email.
This works when the catalog is small enough to design around, the brand carries weight, and the operator wants the code in their account. It does not work for a thousand-variant inventory, a full warehouse system, marketplace seller logins, or a stack of twenty Shopify apps doing twenty things. For those, Shopify Plus is the honest answer and we will tell you so before you sign.
Studio HQ is in San Diego: in-person available across the county the same day, whether the meeting is at a Mission Valley office park or a brewery taproom in Kearny Mesa. Most of the build runs remote. The handoff lands on your domain, with your Stripe keys, with the source code in a repository you own. One person doing the work. That is the point of the price and the speed.
This page was drafted from a structured outline and hand-reviewed before launch. The work itself is custom, owner-operated, never templated.
One paragraph about your business is enough. Or just email hola@xala.studio.