Case Study · Everlore Hollow
How Everlore Hollow went from platform-locked to fully custom — and why that changes everything.
I took a business that was trapped inside Shopify’s box, paying for seven tools that didn’t talk to each other, and rebuilt it into a system the founder fully owns.
This is a story about control
You start a business. You pick Shopify. Makes sense. It’s easy.
Then you need email. So you add Klaviyo.
Then you need support. So you bolt on a chat widget.
Then subscriptions. Then reviews. Then shipping. Then a project management tool.
Now you have seven tools. None of them know about each other. None of them look like they belong to the same brand. And none of them bend to fit the way your business actually works.
So you become the glue.
You’re the one moving data between dashboards. You’re the one who remembers “when X happens over here, I need to go do Y over there.” You’re the one staring at a customer portal that looks like a completely different company than your homepage.
And when you have a problem that’s unique to your business? You go looking for an app. Nothing fits. So you either settle for “close enough” or do it by hand.
That’s where Everlore Hollow was. That’s probably where you are right now.
The Before
A business shaped by its vendor’s limitations.
Everlore Hollow is a dark fantasy subscription box built around a serialized story. But the business model doesn’t matter for what we’re about to talk about. What matters is this: the founder was running a growing business on a stack of tools she didn’t control, couldn’t customize, and couldn’t make feel like hers.
Checkout
Looked like Shopify’s checkout…because it was. Didn’t match the brand. Couldn’t collect the data the business actually needed. Couldn’t even upsell without paying for Shopify Plus.
Customer portal
A Shopify account page with the brand’s logo slapped on top. The same template every other store uses. No way to surface what actually mattered to this business’s customers.
Support
A third-party chat widget that looked bolted on. Agents had no customer context. Every conversation started with “let me look that up” while the customer waited.
Lived inside Klaviyo’s ecosystem. Klaviyo owned the logic, the templates, the data model, and the rules. Want to trigger an email on something Klaviyo didn’t track? Hire a dev.
Internal ops
Spread across Airtable, Notion, and memory. No single place to see what was happening. No forecasting. No supply chain visibility. No task system built for how the team actually worked.
It wasn’t just inefficient. It felt wrong. The founder had built a premium brand with deep storytelling and handcrafted products — and the operational experience was generic, duct-taped, and fragile. The brand promised something special. The infrastructure delivered something average.
The After
A business that looks, feels, and operates like it was built from the inside out.
Every customer touchpoint feels like one brand.
The checkout
Custom. Matches the brand’s typography, colors, and feel. Collects exactly the data the business needs: personalized fields, in-checkout upsells, structured consent, phone with opt-in. The customer never leaves the brand experience.
The customer portal
Not a Shopify account page anymore. It’s a custom interface that looks like it belongs on the site because it is the site. Subscriptions, story progression, shipments — presented the way the brand wants, not the way a platform dictates.
Support chat
Native, not a generic widget in the corner. The moment a customer opens a conversation, their full profile — purchase history, subscription status, engagement, shipping info — is pulled into the agent’s view. The conversation starts with context, not detective work.
Emails
Match the brand and are triggered by what actually happens in the business — not just what Klaviyo’s default events can see. A quiz answer can trigger a specific message. A customer going quiet triggers a response. The brand controls the logic, not the vendor.
This is what “premium” actually means in operations. It’s not about spending more money. It’s about every piece of the customer experience feeling intentional, cohesive, and yours. (And coincidentally, saving a ton of money.)
The operator sees everything in one place.
Unified customer system
One system tracks customers across every touchpoint — orders, engagement, support, email behavior, product usage. When a customer is thriving, you can see it. When a customer is about to churn, you can see that too.
Custom supply chain
Handles inventory forecasting, vendor management, and production tracking. Not a generic WMS jammed into the business — a system built around how this business actually sources, produces, and ships.
Custom task management
Replaces the off-the-shelf project tools that never quite fit. Built for how the team actually operates instead of forcing the team into someone else’s paradigm.
Daily briefing
Assembles itself every morning. Instead of 30 minutes of dashboards, the operator starts with a clear picture: what needs attention, what’s blocked, what’s moving, what changed overnight.
Real attribution
Which campaigns drove revenue? Which products generate support issues? What’s the actual time between first and second purchase by channel? Answered in real time, from real data.
The founder can build anything — fast.
A new landing page takes minutes
Because the entire system is custom and well-structured, AI can work with it natively. Brand guidelines, component patterns, design tokens, page structures — it’s all consistent and documented. The founder tells AI what the page needs to do, and it ships.
Custom lead tools in an afternoon
Need a calculator, a quiz, an interactive tool that captures leads and feeds them into your system? Build it. It already knows how to talk to the rest of the infrastructure.
Custom solutions, not compromises
Supply chain forecasting didn’t mean finding a SaaS tool that “kind of” worked. It meant building the system that fit. Task management didn’t mean forcing work into Asana’s paradigm. It meant building the tool that matched the team.
Changes ship in hours, not weeks
No waiting on a developer. No submitting a ticket to an agency. No praying a Shopify app update doesn’t break something. See a problem in the morning, ship a fix by lunch.
The Results
Before vs. after.
“But my business isn’t that complex”
It doesn’t have to be. That’s the point.
Everlore Hollow is the extreme version. Serialized storytelling, digital companion apps, episode-based progression. It needed a full custom build because nothing off the shelf could handle it. Most businesses don’t need that. Most businesses need three things:
Real visibility across the business — not just synced data.
You’re probably already on Shopify, Klaviyo, and a support tool. The basic integrations work. But the connections are shallow — they move data without building intelligence. You can’t answer “which customers are about to churn” or “which acquisition channel produces the highest lifetime value” because the data lives in five places. I build the layer that connects them deeply.
The ability to solve unique problems without being stuck in a vendor’s box.
Every business has something that doesn’t fit neatly into an off-the-shelf tool. A workflow specific to your industry. A customer experience no app supports. A report no dashboard provides. Right now, you settle for “close enough” or skip it. I give you the ability to build exactly what you need without rebuilding everything else.
A system that lets you move fast instead of waiting on other people.
You have an idea for a landing page. A promotion. A tool you want to offer customers. Right now that means calling a developer, briefing an agency, or fighting with a page builder. When your system is structured right, AI can do the heavy lifting — because it understands your brand, your components, and your data. What used to take weeks takes hours.
The Everlore Hollow project delivered all three at the most complex end of the spectrum. For most operators, the engagement is faster, simpler, and starts with the highest-leverage wins first.
The Approach
Build with Travis, in six phases.
I don’t sell AI tools. I don’t add another layer of duct tape to your stack. I build the operating system your business should be running on — starting with what you already have and adding custom capability where it actually matters.
I map every tool, every manual step, every “I just do that in my head” process, and every place you’ve settled for “close enough” because the right solution didn’t exist. I find where the real leverage is.
I design a system where your tools share a single source of truth, your customer experience is cohesive, and you have the infrastructure to build custom solutions when you need them.
I start with the highest-leverage wins — the automations that save the most time, the visibility that unlocks the best decisions, and the custom experiences that make your brand feel premium.
I instrument the system so you can see what’s working, what’s breaking, and where the next opportunity is.
You own everything. I train your team, document the system, and make sure you can run it — and build on it — without us.
Once the foundation works, I help you identify the next layer of capability that compounds on what’s already built. New tools, new automations, new customer experiences — shipped fast, because the system is designed for it.
One line to remember
I didn’t just automate the business. I gave the founder the ability to build anything the business needs — and made it all feel like one brand.
If your business is shaped by your vendor’s limitations instead of your own vision, we should talk.