A non-technical owner. A trilingual storefront. A dashboard he runs without us.
The call
Classic is a men's boutique in Nouakchott. The owner doesn't write code and doesn't want to — but he knows his store, his customers, and what luxury means in his three languages. The brief was simple: extend the in-store feel online, give him a mobile app for the customers who come back, and a back office his team can operate without picking up the phone to an engineer.
The market constraints were real. Payments still run on bank transfer plus a screenshot. WhatsApp is the channel customers actually read. Arabic copy has to feel native — not translated. And the owner needed to be able to do the daily work himself.
What we did
We built the storefront, the apps and the admin as one cleanly separated system — thirteen domains, one deployable, easy to reason about.
A trilingual web storefront on Next.js, RTL by default, with CSS logical properties end-to-end so the same components hold up in all three directions. Phone-OTP auth over WhatsApp — no passwords, no email, no friction. Prices stored as integer millimes so the five- and six-digit MRU figures don't catch floating-point on the way to checkout.
A WhatsApp marketing engine inside the admin. The owner builds campaigns from templated arrivals, Eid, Ramadan, restock — targets segments like recent buyers or inactive customers, sends a live test, watches deliveries roll in. No engineering involved.
A payments flow that fits the market. Customers upload a transfer screenshot at checkout; staff verify, accept, or reject with a reason; the customer hears back over WhatsApp. The manual step is real — we just made it fast and auditable.
iOS and Android apps in full parity with the web, published to both stores.
Where it sits now
Live at classicmrt.com with daily orders. The team runs the whole thing themselves — campaigns, payments, inventory, catalog — without us.
And because the architecture stayed clean enough to lift cleanly, the platform itself is now available under licence for other regional retailers who want the same shape: trilingual, RTL-first, WhatsApp-native, manual-payment-friendly. The store became the proof; the platform became the product.
Next.js, React Native via Expo, Drizzle on Neon Postgres, Cloudinary, WhatsApp via WahaSend, Firebase push.