Tinybee Toys

Tinybee is a wooden-toy brand for kids — alphabet puzzles, pull-along animals, 3D puzzles, teethers. They needed a marketing and catalog site to sit at tinybee.toys, ahead of a longer-term e-commerce build. I designed and built it end-to-end.

The brand had product photography, copy and a category structure but no web presence. The site had to present the catalog cleanly, let visitors filter by category, drill into each product's gallery and specs, and route enquiries to the founders — with no CMS budget and no backend to run.

Single-page Angular 11 app with the product catalog bundled as a versioned JSON file the components read directly. Product list, product detail and related-products are all derived from that file client-side; the contact form posts through SmtpJS to a Gmail relay so the whole site can be served as static assets. Bootstrap 4 and ng-bootstrap for layout, Owl / Slick / Isotope for the marketing carousels, PhotoViewer for the product-image lightbox.

Ship the catalog as static JSON rather than stand up a CMS — 40+ SKUs updated occasionally didn't justify the operational cost, and a JSON file is a one-line edit for the founders. Angular over React because client is more confident on Angular. Client-side SMTP for contact rather than a serverless function, to keep hosting to a single static bucket.

Shipped as the brand's public site at tinybee.toys, covering the full catalog, product detail, about and blog surfaces. Site is currently offline; the codebase is the archived artifact of that build.

Bundling credentials into a client-side SMTP call is convenient until it isn't — a serverless mail relay would be the right call today. Bundling the catalog as JSON aged well for a small, slow-moving SKU list, but the moment you want inventory or pricing, the CMS-shaped hole shows up fast. Angular's opinionatedness was a real accelerator for a solo build at this scale.