Open Weave
Exploring how software can support highly personal decisions through styling, onboarding, and customer experience design.
Overview
Open Weave was a size-inclusive personal styling service focused on helping women find clothing that fits their bodies, budgets, and lives.
The project combined personalized onboarding, e-commerce infrastructure, and AI-assisted workflows to create a shopping experience that felt more like working with a trusted stylist than browsing a traditional online store.
As founder and technical lead, I was responsible for product strategy, UX design, frontend engineering, system architecture, and customer experience design.
The Problem
Buying clothing online is difficult for many people, but especially for plus-size shoppers.
Sizing varies dramatically between brands. Product photography rarely reflects a wide range of body types. Finding pieces that fit often requires ordering multiple sizes, returning most of them, and repeating the process over and over again.
The core question behind Open Weave was:
Could software help create a more personalized and supportive shopping experience without reducing people to a set of measurements?
Curated inventory organized by size—part of making fit visible before checkout.
Product Goals
Open Weave was designed around several goals:
- Reduce the uncertainty involved in online clothing purchases
- Help customers articulate their style preferences
- Create a more personalized shopping experience
- Support sustainable and secondhand fashion
- Build systems that scale personalized styling workflows
Customer Onboarding
The heart of the product was a multi-step onboarding experience designed to gather information about fit preferences, style, budget, lifestyle, and personal goals.
Unlike traditional clothing filters, the onboarding process focused on how people wanted to feel in their clothing and the tradeoffs they were willing to make.
Multi-step flow with fit and style sliders, color palette cards, and budget preferences—gathered through accessible patterns instead of rigid filters.
The onboarding system included:
- Fit preference sliders
- Style preference mapping
- Color palette selection
- Budget preferences
- Lifestyle and wardrobe goals
- Detailed sizing information
Technical Architecture
Open Weave was built using Shopify’s modern storefront stack and a collection of custom workflows.
Frontend
- Shopify Hydrogen
- React
- TypeScript
- Responsive component architecture
- Accessible form design
Backend
- Shopify Admin APIs
- Customer profile management
- Customer tagging and segmentation
- Style box workflow management
Infrastructure
- Shopify Oxygen
- Server-side rendering
- Automated deployment workflows
Storefront built on Shopify Hydrogen with a size-inclusive value proposition up front.
AI-Assisted Styling Workflows
One of the more interesting challenges was exploring how AI could support personalized styling without replacing human judgment.
The goal was never to automate the stylist. Instead, it was to reduce administrative overhead and surface useful customer insights.
Areas explored included:
- Customer profile summarization
- Preference extraction
- Style recommendation support
- Workflow automation for customer research
This work eventually influenced later projects focused on AI-assisted decision support systems.
What I Learned
Open Weave reinforced something I’ve observed repeatedly throughout my career:
The hardest problems are rarely technical.
Building the application was relatively straightforward compared to understanding how people describe themselves, how confidence affects purchasing decisions, and how to create systems that support people without reducing them to data points.
The project pushed me to think more deeply about accessibility, identity, trust, and the role software should play in highly personal decisions.
Many of the questions that emerged during Open Weave continue to shape my writing and technical work today.
Skills & Technologies
- Product Strategy
- UX Design
- Shopify Hydrogen
- React
- TypeScript
- Customer Experience Design
- AI-Assisted Workflows
- E-Commerce Architecture
- Accessibility
- Design Systems
- Full-Stack Development
Project Status
Open Weave was an exploration of personalized styling, customer onboarding, and technology-assisted retail experiences. While the business itself evolved over time, the project remains one of the clearest examples of my interest in the intersection of software, systems, and human-centered design.
Community launch in Seattle—retail as much about trust and gathering as about the storefront.