Charlie Macnamara (also McNamara)

June 2026, my sister got married — congrats, Floyd — so I needed a kilt. Davison Menswear & Kilt Hire happened to be close. Shop was easy to spot: hand-painted marquee, logo, Est. 1927, and a previously broken URL.

Davison Menswear hero section showing the full-page scroll layout with archival background

Kilt year-round — dog, pub, behind the counter. Open the door and Marty knows your name, last fitting, clan. He works alone, sewing from memory, in a showroom unchanged since his father's day.

His methods, while proven, showed age: calendar bookings misplaced, missed calls, staying late to rewrite orders. He was keen on upgrading; old site was down for years.

Requirements

Unrealistic to expect a kilt maker to learn new tools after decades on paper.

I demoed Sicamon — a Stripe CMS. Understandably, this was too much change. Not looking to become an overnight online shop. Every tool feels familiar.

Stack costs nothing. Workers scale between bookings and free tiers cover traffic. Each worker deploys independently, minimising risk.

Runs on:

Workers
D1
KV
Turnstile
Resend
Next.js
Tailwind
Google Calendar
GitHub Actions

Design

Project splits into two main pages: public business and a private orders dashboard. Tailwind enforces a consistent design system — utility classes, no magic numbers. Fluid typography.

I wanted heritage design notes. Marty handed me a binder of original marketing adverts from 1920/1950: hand-drawn illustrations, commissioned artwork (took ages to scan).

Original archival photo of Davison Menswear from the binder, showing the historic shopfront

Original archive binder

Using a translucent white overlay, adverts bleed through as you scroll.

The site's background image composites archival photos of Davison Menswear from the 1920s-1950s

Archival photos composited into the site background — binder became the brand.

Workers

Admin Dashboard Worker — Order management backed by D1. Status tracking, CSV exports, automated emails.

Calendar Worker — Dedicated worker with its own credentials. Talks to Google Calendar for slot management — availability checks, event creation, and closure detection.

Frontend Worker — The shop window. Serves every page — hero, map, services, tartan search widget, reviews, and booking button. Static build, globally distributed.

Reviews Worker — Pulls Google Reviews on a schedule into KV. Fresh content, zero effort.

Reviews widget on the live site.

Main Site

Business site is a single page: header, map, services, tartan search, reviews, and bookings.

Tartan register is a nice-to-have novelty; searchable directory of clan patterns rendered from official tartan hex codes.

Tartan search directory showing clan and district patterns

Searchable directory of clan and district tartans — a fun bonus for visitors

Rest of page is more practical. Clicking "Book" triggers:

The booking form with date, time, and customer details fields

The booking form — Turnstile bot protection runs invisibly on submit

Booking Pipeline

Bot detection — Turnstile, invisible
Input validation — malformed data rejected
Closure check — reads [Closed] calendar events
Slot availability — no double-booking
Event creation — writes to Google Calendar
Cancel link — signed JWT in the event
Notifications — async emails to both customer and site owner, never blocks

Booking confirmation screen showing the confirmed appointment

Branded booking confirmation email sent to the customer

Owner alert email notifying of a new booking

First, the customer sees the booking confirmed — the appointment locks in and emails go out.

Google Calendar showing a booked fitting appointment

Google Calendar handles the booking slots — already in place before this project.

Admin Dashboard

Private notepad replacement page. Independent Cloudflare Worker backed by D1.

Full admin dashboard

Four statuses: In Progress, Ready, Delivered, Cancelled. Every transition logged immutably — who changed it, when, and whether the email went out.

Emails fire on status changes via Resend. Receipt includes bank details — stored as Worker secrets, never in the codebase. On creation, the customer gets payment instructions. When ready, a collection email fires.

CSV export: current tax year, last year, or custom range. Clean totals.

Quick Add for reconciling past orders.

Add Single Order — measurement references and a notify toggle, with an option for group orders.

Mobile admin page with the Add Single Order button

Add Single Order — every order starts here

Testing

This runs a business. If a booking drops, that's a customer standing outside.

Five stages of quality assurance: from static analysis through to production monitoring

Five stages sit between production. Static audits catch hardcoded secrets and broken contracts before a test even runs. Worker tests (Vitest + Miniflare) mock every external dependency.

Integration and E2E tests prove real integrations work (Google Calendar, Resend, Turnstile) and drive full booking flow and admin lifecycle.

Pre-deploy checks probe all workers before deployments. If something's degraded, the deploy stops. Once live, post-deploy monitoring probes every six hours, runs a worker self-check, and Lighthouse scores every deploy.

CI/CD

Every push to main runs lint, TypeScript, audit rules, worker tests, and Playwright . If they pass, Workers deploy in sequence: calendar first, then reviews, admin dashboard with D1 migrations, then the main site.

Health probes verify endpoints mid‑pipeline. Site uses a safe rollout: build, upload, promote.

Final

Binder's back, same marquee hangs, and qualitykilts.com is live. Marty still works in his showroom — now without missed calls or double-bookings.

Thanks for reading. Reach out at mail@charliemacnamara.uk.