Nishn

The stationery and personalised print industry has long been fragmented. Customers who wanted a truly custom product faced one of two frustrating realities: either they hired a graphic designer and waited weeks for files they couldn't easily tweak, or they used generic online tools that produced flat, impersonal results with little control over print specifications.

For businesses and individuals who care about quality (couples planning weddings, small business owners crafting brand collateral, event planners who need cohesion across every printed piece), there was no single platform that offered: a professional-grade design editor with beautiful, ready-to-use templates; seamless print ordering with real-time pricing based on paper stock, size, finish, and quantity; a subscription model that made repeated use economical, rewarding loyal creators with token-based access; and multi-currency, multi-supplier support for an international customer base.

The result was a market gap: premium print quality was accessible only to those with design skills or deep budgets. Nishn was built to close that gap.

Nishn is a full-stack design and print platform consisting of two tightly integrated products: Nishn Web App, a consumer-facing platform with a design editor, template library, subscription management, cart, and print ordering flow; and Nishn API, a production-grade REST API that orchestrates authentication, subscriptions, payments (Stripe), print pricing, order management, supplier coordination, and real-time notifications.

Together, they form a cohesive product loop: design -> subscribe -> export or print -> receive.

Before a single screen was designed, the team spent time on the most important question: what does this product actually need to be?

That clarity shaped everything that followed. The first month was about getting the fundamentals right: user accounts, secure login (including Google sign-in), and a solid data structure that could support everything to come: subscriptions, design projects, orders, and payments. Getting this right early meant the team could move fast without rebuilding anything from scratch.

The heart of Nishn is the design experience. Users needed creative freedom without feeling overwhelmed, so the team embedded a powerful design editor and wrapped it entirely in Nishn's own visual identity: warm tones, elegant typography, and an interface that feels like it belongs.

A curated template library was built alongside it, giving users beautiful starting points rather than a blank canvas. Every project a user creates is saved to their account and linked to their subscription, making it easy to pick up exactly where they left off.

Nishn needed a pricing model that felt fair and transparent. The answer was a token-based subscription system: users subscribe to a plan, receive a token allowance, and spend tokens when they export a design or send it to print. It's clear, predictable, and scales naturally as users do more.

Payments were handled through Stripe, giving users a checkout experience they already trust, along with a self-serve portal to manage their plan, update billing, or upgrade at any time. Pricing was set up to work across multiple currencies from day one, so the platform could serve customers internationally without friction.

The final phase brought the platform's most ambitious feature to life: end-to-end print ordering.

Users design something they love, then configure how they want it printed, choosing the product type, size, paper finish, and quantity through a guided step-by-step wizard. The platform calculates the price in real time and handles everything from there: routing the order to the right supplier, managing shipping, and keeping the customer informed at every step.

For complex or bespoke orders, a quote flow was built in, allowing the team to provide custom pricing that users can review and accept before committing.

Tokens over time limits: Subscriptions are measured in tokens, not days. Users always know exactly what they've used and what they have left, with no surprises at the end of a billing cycle.

Content managed outside the codebase: All marketing copy (homepage sections, pricing descriptions, FAQs) lives in a content management system. The team can update the website without a developer touching code.

A guided print wizard: Rather than presenting all print options at once, the ordering flow walks users through one decision at a time, skipping steps that aren't relevant to their chosen product. A genuinely complex configuration feels simple.

Built for international customers from day one: Multi-currency pricing and country-aware tax were part of the core design from the start, not retrofitted later. Expanding to a new market required no structural changes.

End-to-end ownership of the print journey. Most design tools hand off to a third-party print provider with no visibility into what happens next. Nishn owns the entire pipeline, from design to supplier coordination to shipping, giving the team full control over quality and the customer experience.

A pricing engine built for complexity. The combination of product type x size x format x orientation x sides x paper stock x quantity x country x supplier (each with its own pricing tier and margin logic) is genuinely complex. Rather than hard-coding lookup tables, Nishn built a relational pricing system that can be maintained by non-engineers through an admin interface.

Brand-first design system. The Nishn visual identity (the warm beige background, red primary, off-white card surfaces, and Averia Sans Libre headings) is codified in Tailwind CSS design tokens and shared across every page, component, and interactive state. The result is a platform that feels considered and premium, not assembled from off-the-shelf parts.

Subscription flexibility without lock-in. Token-based subscriptions, Stripe Customer Portal integration, and per-country pricing give users control and trust. They can change plans, see exactly what they've used, and understand what they'll be charged, in their own currency.

Built for international scale from day one. Multi-currency, multi-supplier, and zone-based shipping were designed into the data model at the start, not retrofitted. The platform supports NZD, AUD, USD, GBP, and CAD with country-specific tax labels (GST, VAT, Sales Tax), without any hardcoded regional logic in application code.

Building Nishn in three months required holding two very different engineering contexts simultaneously: the polished, brand-conscious world of the Next.js frontend, and the rigorous, domain-heavy world of the NestJS API. The tension between those two, making the frontend feel effortless while the backend handles real-world complexity like quote workflows, token pools, and multi-supplier shipping calculations, is what made this project genuinely challenging and genuinely rewarding.

The platform was delivered as a fully production-ready system (containerised, continuously deployed via GitLab CI, and running across staging and production environments). Every design decision was made with growth in mind (more product types, more countries, more suppliers, more subscription tiers) without requiring a rewrite.

Nishn shipped on time, on scope, and built to last.