Turning a song into an object you keep.
Plynth is a demonstration storefront for personalised NFC vinyl magnets — tap one with your phone and “your song” plays. It exists to show an end-to-end commerce experience: real music search, AI-assisted artwork, a considered configurator, and a cart tuned by hand. No payment is taken and no orders are fulfilled.
- Role
- Design & build
- Studio
- Koha Studio
- Timeline
- ~2 weeks
- Type
- Portfolio demo
Make a small object feel like it’s worth a lot.
The hard part of a gift like this isn’t manufacturing — it’s the moment of choosing. A buyer arrives with a feeling (“our song”) and has to turn it into a finished, personalised product without ever feeling like they’re filling in a form. The storefront had to carry that emotion the whole way from landing page to checkout, while still being an honest demonstration of the engineering underneath.
Editorial calm over commerce noise.
The visual language leans on a warm paper palette, a serif display face, and a single amber accent — closer to a printed journal than a typical store. Whitespace and hairline rules do the structuring; there are no loud badges or countdown timers. Every interactive surface — the configurator, the cart, the previews — was built from a small set of shared tokens so the whole thing feels of one piece.
Four pieces, one continuous flow.
A four-step configurator
Search → listen → confirm → design. State lives in a dedicated Redux slice so a half-finished gift survives navigation, and the live preview disc re-skins itself from the chosen palette.
Real music search
A thin API route proxies the iTunes Search API for genuine track results and 30-second audio previews — no mocked catalogue behind the search box.
AI-assisted artwork
A server route hands the track to Claude, which returns a colour palette, a style, and a short poetic tagline. It degrades to a tasteful fallback when no API key is present.
A cart that behaves
A slide-over drawer with a free-shipping progress bar, per-line customisation summaries, and an upsell module that adds a distinct add-on line (no price collisions) and animates before it retires.
The stack.
What’s real, and what’s staged.
Music search and the AI artwork suggestions call live services. The catalogue and reviews are placeholders, and checkout is a faithful but simulated flow — it validates, confirms, and clears the bag without ever taking a payment. The goal was to demonstrate the experience and the engineering, not to operate a shop.
Try the configurator
Search a real song, hear a preview, and watch the disc design itself.