The product
Maker’s Row connects brands developing physical products with manufacturing partners. Its marketplace brings together project requirements, manufacturer discovery, proposals, and conversations. A brand can describe what it wants to make, explore factories by capability and location, and compare potential partners. Manufacturers can present their work, discover relevant projects, and respond to prospective customers.
The public platform spans categories such as apparel, textiles, furniture, packaging, and beauty. Its workflow starts before production: a brand turns an idea into a usable brief, identifies appropriate capabilities, and begins a conversation about feasibility. For a manufacturer, the corresponding workflow is to make expertise discoverable and turn relevant project opportunities into proposals and discussions. Educational resources and AI-assisted tools are additional parts of the public offering.
- Create a brief
Describe the product
- Find capabilities
Explore manufacturers
- Connect
Discuss production
The challenge
Modernizing an established marketplace involves more than publishing a refreshed interface. Existing workflows, business rules, background processing, and release practices all have to be considered together. The transition also has to distinguish the work of the developer building the new experience from the engineering work needed to bring that experience into service.
My strongest contribution was at that intersection. I had worked on the existing application and its release integration before taking a leading role in the revamped platform’s migration and rollout. That earlier delivery work provided context for the transition and the checks needed around it.
My contribution
Working through Embark, I contributed full-stack features and regularly integrated application changes for release. My feature work included manufacturer onboarding and subscription-related journeys, plan-based behavior, and dashboard improvements. I also brought teammates’ changes together as part of the existing application’s delivery process.
For the later revamp, I led migration planning, rehearsal coordination, release decisions, and rollout. A teammate built the new frontend and the revamp’s application features. My role was to make the transition executable: establish the sequence, review readiness, decide what belonged in the launch scope, coordinate validation, and approve the progression from preparation to launch.
Technical decisions
I directed a staged migration approach with rehearsal before the final transition. The team checked the candidate application, practiced the migration sequence, and coordinated application validation with the developer responsible for the revamp. I treated launch readiness as a set of explicit decisions, rather than assuming that a successful build alone meant the whole transition was ready.
The blue/green AWS migration used rehearsals and record-count verification. AWS EC2, S3 and Laravel Forge formed part of the delivery context.
Scope control also mattered. I separated launch-critical work from follow-on tasks and kept the execution plan focused on the transition itself. Claude Code assisted with planning documents, execution, and checks under my direction. I remained responsible for the go-ahead decisions and for translating the technical work into a clear account of the release.
Outcome
The revamped Maker’s Row platform reached production in October 2026 through a coordinated migration. My contribution combined an established application-delivery role with ownership of the rollout process. The result demonstrates practical migration leadership: connecting the work of the product developer with rehearsals, validation, and a controlled release sequence, while keeping individual and team contributions clear.
Relevant stack
Laravel / PHP, MySQL, Vue for the legacy application, Redis / Horizon, Stripe, Algolia, AWS EC2 / S3, and Laravel Forge.
The teammate-built revamp uses Blade, Alpine, Tailwind, and Vite.