Alfaiate

Alfaiate (Portuguese for "tailor") is the software that runs Suitmade, an online made-to-measure suit shop at suitmade.eu. It covers the whole business: the store where a customer designs and pays for a suit, and the admin where the team turns that order into a garment and ships it.

Designing a suit

The heart of the store is the Atelier, a visual builder. The customer picks a jacket style, lapels, vents, a vest, trousers, lining and a monogram, and chooses from the fabric library. The suit is drawn on a model as they go, in the actual cloth, from the front or the back, on one of three models. A fabric preview shows a close-up of each cloth with its mill, composition, weight and season, and the price updates with every choice.

Under the hood, each part of the garment is a layer of artwork for each model and view. The chosen fabric is tinted into each zone of the garment on a canvas, and an overlay pass adds folds and shading so the cloth sits naturally instead of looking flat. Rules keep combinations valid, and every option and fabric can carry its own price.

From order to garment

After designing the suit, the customer adds their measurements, saved as profiles that keep every version, and their fit preferences, then pays through Stripe. The store picks the right language, currency and units for each visitor, and they can change them.

At checkout, the configuration, measurements and price are frozen into the order, so later changes to products or prices never alter what the customer bought. In the admin, the team:

• Reviews and approves each order.
• Creates a production job with a printable job sheet: the customer's note, the garment, every style choice, each body measurement and the fit profile.
• Tracks production with assignees, priorities and due dates, through quality control to shipping.
• Ships using shipping zones, package sizes and garment weights.
• Handles fit issues after delivery, which can be approved as an alteration or a remake.

Fabric stock

Tailoring runs on cloth, so stock is built in. Each fabric's stock is tracked precisely, fabric is reserved for orders so the available amount is always real, and the admin shows low-stock alerts, reorder suggestions and suppliers. Reports cover stock movements, popular and slow-moving fabrics, a stock forecast and wastage.

How it's built

Alfaiate is a Turborepo monorepo with three apps:

• API: NestJS with Prisma on PostgreSQL, Stripe for payments, and documented endpoints. Customer and staff sign-in are completely separate.
• Storefront: Next.js, with the Atelier builder drawing on a 2D canvas.
• Admin: Next.js, with roles for admins, operations, support and content editors, and an audit log.

Money is stored in cents, and the admin covers the catalogue, fabrics, suppliers, the CMS, translations and shipping as well as orders and production.

How it was made

I designed Alfaiate and wrote its planning documents: the data model, API specification, business rules, roles, customer flow and build order. A developer wrote most of the code with me, phase by phase. The first commit was on 3 April 2026, the full first build landed at the end of April, and the visual Atelier builder followed in July.