A bakery built on stone-ground flour, slow fermentation, and stubborn craft — and the website that finally lets the world taste it.
Simply
Sourdough.
A field report by ORB IT Solutions · Middletown, Ohio
| Client | Simply Sourdough |
|---|---|
| Engagement | E-commerce · Branding · SEO |
| Location | Middletown, Ohio |
| Timeline | Jan 2025 — ongoing |
| Stack | SvelteKit · Rust · Stripe |
| Status | ◉ Live in production |
Simply Sourdough is a female-run microbakery in Middletown, Ohio—the kind of operation whose differentiator is unambiguous: real ingredients, real fermentation, no shortcuts. Bread you'd recognize as bread. By late 2024, demand had outpaced their "text messages and Venmo" beginnings. They needed a better way to take orders and came to us looking for a solution.
The brief was simple: "Build us a beautiful storefront that tells our story, takes orders, and gets out of our way." We delivered an e-commerce experience that is a reflection of their brand. Every pixel, intentional: from the color palette to the product photography, from the checkout experience to the email confirmations. The result is a storefront that drives repeat orders, builds customer relationships, and gives this microbakery the infrastructure needed for a thriving e-commerce business.
Throughout the project, we iterated closely with the team—designing logos, refining UX, integrating payment processing, and ensuring the platform could scale with their growth. Now they have a solution with no lock-in, complete autonomy over their customer data and own their digital presence.
We wanted our digital experience to feel as premium as our bread. Shopify themes couldn't cut it, but ORB IT Solutions delivered.
◉ Simply Sourdough · § Why Choose Us
Sized to your business, not assumptions
We designed Simply Sourdough's infrastructure with them in mind: no unnecessary hosted databases, no premature optimization, no features until they needed it. Every architectural decision prioritized simplicity, testability, and the ability to hand off a maintainable codebase to the client.
- 1.
Static-first: We generate the entire site upfront at build time. This contributes to faster load times and better SEO, helping more customers find the bakery through online search. After deploying there's no server-side runtime to interfere with the site's main goal: presenting all products available for purchase.
- 2.
Store cart data, not user data: The client had very specific requests on how ordering—the raison d'être—should work, precluding the use of generic e-commerce solutions: cart state should be available offline, different SKUs had different quantity caps, etc. We did this while ensuring no financial data was stored by us, handing off to a secure payment processor via a thin Rust API.
- 3.
Deployment & CI-CD: To enable the site to load quickly, products are fetched once from a self-hosted CMS at build time. We also query this database at runtime to fetch the latest product data. If the CMS is unreachable, a typed local fallback catalog is used. The site never becomes unusable or fails to build.
- 4.
Self-hosted everywhere it matters: Both the analytics and content management system used are self-hosted. The bakery owns all critical pieces of its techonology stack. This makes recurring costs predictable, and bounded.
Not "ship it and move on."
| LAYER | TOOL | COVERAGE |
|---|---|---|
| Unit | Vitest (node) | Pure logic — ordering math, cart helpers, formatters |
| Component | Vitest browser + Playwright | Every Storybook story doubles as a test |
| Visual regression | Chromatic | Light + dark snapshots on every PR |
| E2E | Playwright | 4 projects · admin + customer + a11y |
| Accessibility | axe-core + html-validate | Wired into the e2e suite; zero violations |
| API mocking | MSW | Used in both Storybook and tests |
◉ End of field report ◊ ◊ ◊
Want this for your business?
If you're a maker, a small brand, or an owner-operator who needs a digital experience that respects your craft and your margins — we'd love to talk.