Maison bwian

The brief

First, a chatbot people would talk to for the fun of it: one with taste, opinions and timing, not a help widget, and one that stays on the right side of the line however hard people push.

Then the character outgrew the chat window. It became the voice of a small label with no warehouse, selling t-shirts and jackets made to order, so the shop had to take money, hand the order to a printer and tell the customer when it ships, without someone copying details between dashboards.

The character

Bwian is built on Anthropic’s Claude models. A single personality dial moves it across five distinct personas, from rascal to an impeccable butler, each with its own register and humour.

Fixed limits sit beneath every persona. When someone pushes toward hateful content, Bwian declines in character, with disdain rather than a canned refusal, so the experience holds together.

The house

A complete storefront with an editorial, luxury-house presentation, where Bwian greets visitors as concierge. Behind it runs an order pipeline: bag, server-priced checkout through Stripe, a paid order recorded in the order book, a production order placed with Printful, and tracking saved when the parcel ships.

The shop works at every stage of setup. With no keys it runs as a browsable preview; with Stripe it takes real payments; with Printful connected, paid orders become drafts for one-click approval, or go straight to production.

Under the hood

• Signed Stripe and Printful webhooks drive every status change.
• The catalogue is one file of products, cuts, colours and copy; a check script reports any variant the printer can’t fill yet.
• Print files are rendered at 300 DPI from vector sources.
• No third-party packages: storefront, API and webhooks run in one small Node process.