Merme: a Shopify store and the inventory system behind it
How BotBrained built merme.in, a custom Shopify theme for a handcrafted stoneware brand, and the offline-first inventory system that follows every piece from the Auroville workshops to the Morbi warehouse to the storefront.
- Client
- Merme
- Sector
- Handcrafted stoneware, woodfired pottery and gift hampers, shipped pan-India
- Services
- Custom Shopify theme · Inventory system · Shopify integration · Android app (TWA)
- Status
- Storefront live on merme.in since August 2026; inventory system in production use
What was the problem?
Merme sells wheel-thrown stoneware made in small batches by artisans in Auroville. Pieces move from several workshops to a warehouse in Morbi and from there to customers across India. Stock lived in spreadsheets and messages, so the store could sell a piece that was still on a workshop shelf, or fail to list one that had arrived.
A Shopify store on a template was not the problem. The problem was that nothing between the workshop and the storefront was designed to be operated by the people actually packing and receiving cartons, on phones, often without a reliable connection.
What did BotBrained build?
- 01
A theme designed around the product
A custom Dawn-derived Liquid theme with the brand’s serif identity carried through collections, product pages and gifting flows. Every section is editable from the theme editor, so the team changes campaigns without a developer.
- 02
Camera-first packing on the workshop floor
Packers photograph pieces as they go into a carton and write a short carton code by hand. Codes carry a check digit, so a misread code is caught at the warehouse instead of becoming a wrong count. Packing works offline and syncs when the phone finds a signal.
- 03
Receiving with an append-only ledger
The warehouse receives cartons against what was packed. Every receipt is a ledger entry, never an overwrite, so discrepancies are visible and traceable rather than silently corrected. New products and variants are staged, approved and merged before they touch the catalogue.
- 04
Delta-only sync to Shopify
Only the difference in stock is written to Shopify, with a nightly reconciliation against the store so the two never drift. The storefront cannot sell a piece that is not physically on a shelf.
- 05
Three surfaces, one codebase
Packer, receiver and admin dashboard are role-gated views of one app, localised for the floor teams and packaged as an Android app so it installs like any other.
Something
like this?
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