A custom storefront wired straight into Stripe: your brand, your data, your domain. No Shopify, no monthly platform fee. Built for the family businesses, makers, and Artists Village operators who keep Santa Ana's economy moving.
Santa Ana is three hundred and ten thousand people and a dense layer of family-owned business, manufacturing, and a real creative scene in the Artists Village and Downtown. A second-generation family shop with a product line worth selling beyond the counter. A small manufacturer that makes a thing other people resell and wants its own direct channel. A Downtown maker turning out a limited run of goods. These are operators who built something real and want margin they don't have to share.
Put a family business on Shopify and the monthly platform fee plus app subscriptions become a tax on a tight margin, money that should stay in a business already watching every dollar. The theme also strips the thing that makes a family or maker brand worth buying: the specific voice, the history, the face behind the counter. A rented store reads anonymous, which is exactly wrong for a business whose name is the asset.
Stripe-direct removes both problems. Stripe processes the card; everything else (layout, the product page, the cart, the checkout, the receipt) is written from scratch around the business. You pay the processing fee and no monthly rent. For a family operator or maker selling direct, keeping the platform percentage in the account is the difference the price pays for in a season.
A family business selling direct. A second-generation Santa Ana shop with twenty products it has sold over the counter for years and wants online without giving a platform a monthly cut. The store carries the family's voice and history, not a theme. Stripe handles the card, local pickup is a checkout option, and the receipt reads like the shop, not a generic store.
A small manufacturer opening a direct channel. A maker that supplies resellers and wants fifteen SKUs sold straight to customers at a better margin. Stripe takes the payment with no platform layer skimming on top, inventory tracks against the production run, and the build hands over clean so the office can manage it without a subscription.
An Artists Village maker with a limited run. A dozen pieces: prints, goods, an edition. Each has its own page with the maker's story; the edition count drops live; the checkout is one screen. Product schema is in place so an AI assistant can recommend the work when someone asks where to buy in Santa Ana.
This works when the catalog is small enough to design around, the brand carries weight, and the operator wants the code in their own account. It does not work for a thousand-variant inventory, a full warehouse system, wholesale-and-retail seller logins, or a stack of Shopify apps. For those, Shopify Plus is the honest answer and we will tell you so before you sign rather than sell a build that won't fit.
Studio HQ is in San Diego, with Santa Ana reachable in about ninety minutes. Most of the build runs remote, with an on-site day Downtown or in the Artists Village when a job warrants it. The handoff lands on your domain, with your Stripe keys, with the source in a repository you own. One person doing the work. That is 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.