Platform overview
One backend for the customer and operational sides of the marketplace
VB Kouture connects three groups with different needs: customers buying fashion, suppliers managing commercial relationships, and internal teams controlling products, orders, inventory, and reporting.
I led the technical delivery across the complete product, including architecture, frontend and backend systems, permissions, business rules, integrations, documentation, and automated tests.
Shopping experience
Discovery that helps customers decide what to buy
VB Kouture combines a conventional fashion catalog with AI features that help customers move from browsing to a confident purchase.
- An AI fashion assistant that uses semantic product search to recommend products, styling choices, and complete outfits.
- Virtual try-on that lets customers upload a photo and visualize a garment using IDM-VTON.
- Product browsing across categories, variants, images, video, filters, featured products, and new arrivals.
- Wishlists, product ratings, customer reviews, merchant replies, and automated review requests after purchase.
Checkout and fulfilment
The full order lifecycle, not just a checkout form
The backend carries an order from cart to delivery and supports the exceptions that happen after a sale.
- Registered and guest checkout with Helcim payment processing, invoice generation, and payment tracking.
- Order history, status changes, cancellations, and orders placed by sales representatives.
- EasyPost address validation, live shipping rates, label purchasing, shipment tracking, and label refunds.
- Item-level return and refund requests with eligibility checks, evidence images, and administrative review.
Supplier operations
The workflows required to run the marketplace
The internal platform supports the commercial work behind the storefront, including supplier relationships, catalog control, contracts, and inventory decisions.
- Supplier onboarding for independent marketplace sellers and bulk-purchase partnerships.
- Product approval queues for purchasing agents and managers, with assignment, approval, rejection, and notifications.
- Catalog administration with inventory tracking and bulk price adjustments.
- Digital supplier contracts built from reusable templates, with PDF generation, Cloudinary storage, downloads, and email delivery.
- Role-based access for customers, suppliers, administrators, purchasing teams, inventory administrators, content managers, and sales representatives.
Growth and reporting
Tools for communication and business decisions
- Newsletter subscriptions, reusable email templates, bulk campaigns, and subscriber analytics.
- Reports for revenue trends, customer demographics, supplier performance, inventory movement, and returns.
- Top-selling product reporting and Power BI-ready APIs with date-dimension data.
Technical leadership
Technical lead across the entire product
I was the technical lead for VB Kouture. I owned the system architecture and guided the product across frontend, backend, AI features, third-party integrations, delivery planning, and code review.
- Set the architecture and technical direction for the complete platform.
- Led implementation across the customer storefront, supplier workflows, and internal administration tools.
- Planned delivery, broke down work, reviewed code, and kept frontend and backend development aligned.
- Made integration decisions across AI, payments, shipping, media, email, contracts, and reporting.
- Kept technical decisions tied to customer needs and day-to-day marketplace operations.
Platform engineering
Security, reliability, and handoff
- JWT authentication with refresh tokens and role-based permissions.
- Zod validation, centralized error handling, CORS controls, and endpoint-specific rate limits.
- Winston application logging and database-backed error records for operational visibility.
- Swagger API documentation and Postman collections for easier frontend integration and handoff.
- Vitest and Supertest coverage for API behavior.
Technical foundation
Technology used to support the product
The API is built with Node.js, Express, TypeScript, MongoDB, Prisma, and Mongoose. Product integrations include OpenAI and LangChain, Hugging Face IDM-VTON, Helcim, EasyPost, Cloudinary, SendGrid, PDFKit, and Puppeteer.