Airfare

The Startup

Airfare is an e-commerce startup selling nutritious plant-based snacks packaged for air travel. They launched on out-of-the-box Shopify but quickly outgrew it. I came on board to help evolve their platform from a basic single-product store into a robust subscription-based e-commerce experience.

From Single Orders to Subscriptions

The first major shift was building out a subscription model called "Flight Crew", targeted specifically at pilots and flight attendants who needed reliable, healthy snack deliveries on a recurring basis. This meant rethinking the entire purchase flow, homepage structure, and navigation hierarchy.

The best e-commerce platforms don't just sell products. They solve a problem so well that customers never want to leave.

I restructured the site to lead with subscription tiers as the primary product, repositioning single pouch purchases as a low-commitment trial. Each subscription tier was displayed as its own featured product with clear pricing and benefits.

Custom Snack Browser

One of the meatiest builds was the snack browsing experience. Airfare's customers are serious about nutrition. They track macros, follow specific diets, and want to know exactly what they're eating. I built a filterable snack catalog with:

• Multi-criteria filtering by brand, dietary needs, and ingredient categories
• Detailed product modals with full nutrition facts, ingredients, and brand stories
• Favorites system letting users save preferred snacks across sessions
• Mobile-optimized layout since 65% of traffic came from phones

Account Dashboard

The trickiest engineering challenge was the account management system. Subscription orders ran through ReCharge while single purchases stayed on Shopify: two completely separate data sources that needed to feel like one unified experience.

• Unified order history pulling from both Shopify and ReCharge APIs
• Subscription management: pause, cancel, edit shipping dates, update payment methods
• Cross-platform sync ensuring changes in the Airfare dashboard reflected in both Shopify and ReCharge
• Smart notifications with nav badge indicators for unredeemed rewards

The Takeaway

This project was a lesson in building iteratively alongside a growing startup. Every feature shipped informed the next one. The platform evolved from a simple Shopify store into a full subscription commerce experience, and I got to build every layer of that evolution.