Vans Customs

Context

Spent a year as fullstack engineer on Vans Customs — the online experience where customers design their own Vans before they're manufactured. The work spanned the full stack: front-end customization tooling (canvas selection, color picking, decoration overlays in 2D and 3D views), the orchestration layer that turned design state into a manufacturable spec, and the integration into the Vans fulfillment pipeline. A consumer-facing product on a global brand, where every UI decision compounded across millions of catalog impressions across the US, EU, LATAM and APAC markets.

Approach

Two engineering challenges anchored the work.

• The customizer itself. Keeping the 3D and 2D states in sync with real-time preview while preventing invalid combinations the factory couldn't fulfill — color clashes, material incompatibilities, regional availability gaps — surfaced as constraints inside the UI rather than as silent failures downstream.
• The manufacturability bridge. Translating customer design intent into a spec the production line could actually build, including the edge cases that quietly kill DTC customization at scale: clash detection, material compatibility, country-specific catalog availability of bases and decorations.

The product survived the handoff. vans.com/customs is still active eight years later, on a global brand still investing in the experience — the simplest way to read whether the engineering held under conditions far outside any single contributor's control.