Case Study·SaaS Platform·Print-on-demand
Live at pengine.ioMerchants connect a Shopify store, pick blank products, place their artwork and publish, then send orders to production. Our team built the seller app with its fabric.js design editor and bulk tools, the internal admin with a mockup editor and pricing engine, and the Nuxt 4 marketing site.
Vue 3.5
Nuxt 3 & 4
Pinia
PrimeVue 4
Tailwind 4
fabric.js
Typesense
Socket.IO
Stripe
Context
Pengine is a print-on-demand and dropshipping platform for Shopify merchants. Sellers connect their store, choose blank products, design them, set prices and publish, and Pengine takes care of production when orders come in.
The product lives or dies on the seller workflow: how fast a merchant can turn artwork into live products, keep hundreds of them in sync, and get orders into production. Behind it, Pengine's team needs internal tools to build mockup templates, manage a catalog of blanks, and control pricing.
We've worked on Pengine since 2023, through two generations of the product. This page shows the live product and describes our frontend engineering without publishing source code.
The Journey
Pengine shipped early on a simple stack, then moved to Nuxt one app at a time while the old version kept running. It's the approach we recommend to any team with a product that has outgrown its first build. Dates come from the project's git history.
Pengine started as two Vue 3 + Vite single-page apps, one for sellers and one for the internal team. Shopify store connection followed in late 2023. That version carried the business for two years and taught us exactly where the product needed to go.
The internal admin was rebuilt first, in Nuxt, while the old one kept running. It gained the tools the team needed to scale: instant search, a mockup template editor, a full pricing engine and an audit trail.
Then the merchant-facing app, also in Nuxt, rebuilt around the workflows sellers use most: designing products, publishing in bulk, and getting orders into production.
For months both generations ran at once. The new seller app could hand a signed-in user over to the old dashboard for anything not yet rebuilt, so merchants could keep working during the move.
The seller app moved to versioned releases: v1.0.0 shipped in June 2026, and from then on a version tag builds the app and deploys it to S3 behind CloudFront. Dev, staging and production each have their own domain and pipeline.
Finally, a new marketing site on Nuxt 4: server-rendered, with a design system driven by Figma tokens, a Sanity blog the marketing team runs, structured data, generated OG images and a sitemap fed by the CMS.
Hard Problems, Solved
Print-on-demand looks like "upload a design, sell a shirt". Underneath are canvas geometry, bulk jobs, realtime status, search and pricing. These are the problems we solved on Pengine.
Where this applies to you Any editor where user content has to respect physical or business limits: print, signage, packaging, templates.
Where this applies to you Products where on-screen design turns into a physical output: print, embroidery, engraving, signage.
Where this applies to you Internal tools that let your team create visual content without designers or developers in the loop.
Where this applies to you Any product with long-running jobs: exports, imports, AI generation, video processing, reports.
Where this applies to you Bulk imports and batch jobs that users start, leave and come back to.
Where this applies to you Catalogs, marketplaces, admin tables: anywhere users filter large data sets.
Where this applies to you Product customisers and configurators where instant visual feedback drives conversion.
Where this applies to you Configurable pricing, quoting or rating engines where mistakes cost real money.
Architecture
Each app gets the hosting and rendering it needs: static builds for the seller app (on S3 and CloudFront) and the admin, server rendering on Vercel for the marketing site. Search, realtime status, payments and Shopify plug in through proven services.
Vue & Nuxt Depth
The seller app and admin are client-rendered and statically generated; the seller app is served from S3 and CloudFront with immutable assets and revalidated HTML.
The marketing site renders on the server with schema.org data, a CMS-fed sitemap, generated OG images and an llms.txt route.
Two canvas editors living inside Nuxt apps: the seller's design editor and the admin's mockup template editor.
PrimeVue 4 unstyled with Tailwind 4 in the seller app, PrimeVue Aura presets with 11 color themes in the admin, and Figma tokens in the site.
Stores per domain (editor, bulk jobs, orders, billing, pricing) with composables for search, permissions and storage.
A reusable Typesense multi-filter composable powering catalog, orders, products and artwork lists with URL-synced filters.
Store owners invite staff with permissions across six areas; menus, routes and actions adapt to what each user can do.
Cards saved off-session with SetupIntents and 3-D Secure, so card data never touches Pengine's servers; invoices are charged later.
Socket.IO listeners patch render and product status into the UI as jobs finish.
Bulk jobs saved to IndexedDB per user and per store, so a reload never loses progress.
vee-validate with yup schemas across both apps, including conditional pricing validation.
A Sanity blog rendered from Portable Text on the server, with a private dataset and server-only token.
Is This You?
Store connection, product sync, bulk publishing and order flow between your platform and the merchant's store.
Canvas editing with real-world constraints, live previews and output a machine or partner can use.
Imports, batch creation and long-running jobs users can pause, leave and resume.
Component-based pricing, shipping zones, segments and overrides, with validation that catches gaps.
Server-rendered Nuxt with structured data, a headless CMS and a design system that matches the product.
Moving from an aging Vite SPA to Nuxt without stopping the business or stranding users.
FAQ
Our engineers built Pengine's seller app, internal admin and marketing site, and the first-generation Vue apps before them. This page shows the live product and describes our frontend engineering; the backend API isn't covered here.
Yes. Pengine connects to merchants' Shopify stores through its published Shopify app, publishes products in bulk, maps existing Shopify products onto templates, and brings orders back for production.
Yes. Pengine moved from Vue 3 + Vite single-page apps to Nuxt one app at a time, with both generations running side by side so users could keep working throughout. Migrations and long-term maintenance are core VueSquad work.
Yes. Pengine has two fabric.js editors inside Nuxt: a seller design editor with print-safe placement and live DPI, and an admin mockup editor with layered compositing and blend modes.
Both. Pengine's seller app and admin run on Nuxt 3, and its marketing site runs on Nuxt 4. We can start a new project on Nuxt 4 or work in an existing Nuxt 3 codebase.
Send us a short note on the contact page about what you're building and where you're stuck. We'll set up a call to go through your product and codebase.
Get started
Talk to the engineers who built Pengine's design editor, bulk tools, admin and marketing site. Tell us what you're building and where it's stuck.
Matched in 24 hours·48 hours free on every plan·No long-term contract
