Work / Panda Patches / Founder-affiliated
Panda Patches
Case study updated
A custom-patch storefront connected to the team's order-management system.
A 3-year-old WordPress store, rebuilt with a patch configurator, an editor the team controls, and a connected system for orders, production and payments.
- Revenue today
- $55K+/mo (owner-reported, 20 Sep 2026)
- Migration
- 3-year-old site, no ranking losses in the 30 days after launch
- Payments
- Panda Patches started with Stripe. We later moved its payments to Square, which is the current provider.
One business. Three connected parts.
Your customers shop.
Your team keeps things moving.
The storefront customers see, the content editor your team controls, and the operations system behind each order.
01 / Website
What your customers see.
Your public website: where customers explore products, choose their patch specifications and send an enquiry. This is the front end of the business.
Instead of describing everything in a blank message, customers choose their backing, shape, border, size and quantity. The team receives those details with the request and returns a quote.
Customers also have a private portal for order history, tracking and reorders. That login-only area is not pictured here.
The storefront
The public website introduces the products and gives customers a way to start an enquiry.
Choose your patch
Customers choose the details the team needs to prepare a quote.
Send it for a price
The next step captures contact details. This is a quote request, not an instant checkout price.
02 / Content editor
An editor built for the patch business.
Sanity is where your website content lives. You or your marketing team can edit copy, publish articles and add case studies without editing code.
The editor gives your team fields for the content they manage, including promotional banners where configured. Change the content, then publish it to the website without asking a developer to rewrite the page.
These three screens show the actual editing experience: homepage copy, a blog post and a case study.
Homepage copy
Rewrite the homepage's “how we make your patches” steps directly in the editor.
- Choose a homepage section
- Edit headings and steps
- Publish your changes
Blog posts
Publish a new guide, the same editor that runs the storefront's 63-post blog.
- Choose a blog post
- Edit the post details
- Publish your changes
Case studies
Add a case study for a new industry with the same fields every sales page uses.
- Choose a case study
- Edit the case study
- Publish your changes
03 / CRM & operations
Where your business runs.
Your internal system brings customer records, quotes, orders, production, payment status and reports into one place. This is where the team manages the work behind the website.
Sales and production work from the same order records, with access based on their roles. Automations support follow-ups, while activity logs record who changed what and when.
The storefront and operations platform share a Supabase backend. Sanity separately manages website content. Customer and financial details in this screenshot are blurred.
Explore the operations case studyThe operations dashboard
A shared view of orders and production, with reports and team tools available from the same system.
An enquiry becomes a quote. A confirmed order moves through payment, production and delivery—with the team working from the same record.
The business behind the build.
Panda Patches is founder-affiliated: owned and operated by co-founder Imran Raza Ladhani, who holds a stake in both companies. These are first-party, owner-reported figures about the business, not independent client proof, and revenue is business context here, not a result attributed to the rebuild.
- Revenue
- $55K+/mo. Owner-reported, 20 September 2026.
- Search rankings
- No ranking losses recorded in Google Search Console during the 30 days after launch. Full URL export, 301 redirects and a fresh sitemap preceded the cutover.
- Wise / Nasdaq activation
- 9,600 woven patches across 16 designs, delivered in two shipments (4 and 7 May 2026) for Wise's Nasdaq listing activation in Times Square, ordered, produced and tracked through this platform.
- Independent reputation
- Customer reviews are available on Trustpilot. Panda Patches reports more than one million patches delivered historically; that is a business figure, not an independent platform measurement.
05
Technology stack.
We integrate Stripe, Square and other payment providers with your checkout and order workflow. We confirm provider availability, API access and the features you need before agreeing the scope. The owner estimates current tooling at about $55/month (Supabase ~$25, Vercel ~$20, ~$10 for the AI patch generator). That's an owner estimate, not a reconciled accounting total. fal.ai billed $0.12 for the AI patch generator from 1 to 13 October 2026: 39 megapixels of images at $0.003 per megapixel.
The Supabase backend behind the storefront.
The storefront and operations portal share a Supabase backend for the database, authentication, storage buckets and Edge Functions. Customer accounts connect to order history and tracking, while role-based access supports digitizing, reseller, shipping and production workflows. Edge Functions handle server-side business logic and integrations.
The owner reported 47 Edge Function implementations in the CRM repository on 22 October 2026, excluding the _shared helper folder. This is a source-code count, not a verified count of functions deployed live.
Explore the Panda Patches CRMThe full build scope (14 items)
- · 9 product category pages (embroidered, woven, PVC, chenille, leather, silicone, printed, sequin, 3D)
- · 4 additional product pages (lapel pins, challenge coins, keychains, PVC shoe charms)
- · Configurator with backing, shape, border, size and quantity, feeding a quote request
- · Square checkout: card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Cash App Pay, Afterpay BNPL
- · AI patch generator (fal.ai) with a prompt pipeline and abuse-blocking rules
- · Free embroidery tools: thread colour chart with logo colour matching, DST and PES viewers, a DST and PES converter, a stitch count calculator
- · Customer portal: Supabase auth, order history, tracking, one-click reorder
- · Server-side conversion stack: Meta CAPI, GA4/GTM, Google Ads, Pinterest, Bing, an OpenAI pixel
- · Two-stage abandoned-cart recovery (email at 30 min, then 24h with a code)
- · ~30 SEO/AEO landing pages plus an /ai-info answer hub, llms.txt, hreflang, IndexNow
- · Sanity CMS, structured content edited without code
- · 63-post blog library feeding the topical cluster
- · Supabase ops portal: order pipeline, sales dashboards, clock in/out, role-based access, full audit log
- · Responsive storefront with a touch-friendly configuration flow
06
Free tools on the store.
Alongside the shop we built six free tools for people working with embroidery files and patch designs. The file viewers, the stitch calculator and the AI generator each lead to a patch price or a quote.
fal.ai billed $0.12 for the AI patch generator from 1 to 13 October 2026: 39 megapixels of images at $0.003 per megapixel. All six were checked live on 13 October 2026.
How it works day to day
Our founder-affiliated Panda Patches store connects orders, customer approvals and production in one operations portal.
- 01Order
- 02Mockup
- 03Approval and payment
- 04Production
- 05Delivery
- Orders reach the right team
- New orders arrive in one place and are routed to the appropriate team. Rush orders have their own board, with ship-by deadlines calculated in working days.
- Mockups have a follow-up clock
- Each new order starts a 24-business-hour mockup timer. Overdue mockups are flagged, with unresolved alerts escalating to the team lead and then management. Uploading a mockup triggers a customer approval email.
- Payments connect to production
- Staff create Square card or PayPal payment links in one click. Invoices are generated from the order, deposit payments notify the responsible person, and paid orders move to production.
- Conversations stay with the order
- Each order has tasks and chat. Teammate mentions trigger phone or laptop push notifications, overdue tasks are flagged, and each person sees their tasks and chats in urgency order.
- Shipping updates stay connected
- The floor board shows each job's production status. Courier tracking is pulled into the order so customers receive shipping updates without staff retyping them.
- Resellers place their own orders
- Reseller partners use a separate ordering portal connected to the same pricing engine as the public website.
Questions about this project.
How does Panda Patches use Supabase?
Did the Panda Patches WordPress migration preserve Google search rankings?
Can you replace Shopify with a custom coded e-commerce store?
How does the custom patch configurator work?
How much does it cost to build a custom e-commerce platform like this?
What tools did the custom platform replace?
How long did it take to build the Panda Patches platform?
Has the Panda Patches rebuild been covered in the press?
Need your website and order workflow to work together?
Most sites stop at the storefront. This one hands off into the system the team actually runs orders through. Tell us where yours breaks down, and we'll work out what that would take.