Owning the tech side of a bathroom-renovation platform, all the way through a merger.
Part-time CTO for Habitects AG: keeping their B2B bathroom shop running while conceiving, staffing and shipping the configurator that turns a filled-in form into a rendered bathroom, then handing the whole thing over cleanly when the company merged.
Context
Who they are.
Habitects AG ran an online shop for bathroom fittings, aimed mostly at the trade: installers, renovators, people who do this for a living. The bigger idea was a configurator: a homeowner fills in a form about their bathroom, the platform renders what it could look like, and the parts in that render come straight from the shop's own stock. Nobody inside the company owned the technical side of either half.
The problem
What they walked in with.
Two problems at once. The existing shop had to keep selling every day, but nobody left in the building knew how it had been built or what it ran on. And the configurator existed only as an ambition. No concept, no team, no plan for how a form becomes a render, and no route from that render back into the catalogue.
Our approach
How we worked.
Took the shop off life support
Traced an undocumented codebase and infrastructure back to something the team could actually operate: what runs where, what breaks, who to call. Then kept it maintained and moving while the new product was being built, so revenue never paused for the roadmap.
Conceived the configurator
Owned the product from blank page onward: what the form asks, how those answers drive the rendering algorithms, what a good result looks like. Ran it as product owner and project manager through to the third working version, with the Habitects team.
Hired and ran the build team
Sourced and vetted external agencies and developers to turn the concept into a real platform. Hired three of them directly and managed them day to day: briefs, priorities, reviews, delivery.
Handed it over clean
When the merger with Conreal AG came, prepared the technical diligence material and ran the handover to Conreal's CTO in person: architecture, decisions, open threads. The project continued there without a restart.
Highlights
The interesting parts.
- Wired the live shop's stock into the configurator, so a rendered bathroom maps to products you can actually buy, and to a partner who can install them.
- Reverse-engineered a shop nobody understood into documented infrastructure the team could run on their own.
- Supported the business side in winning a partnership with one of Switzerland's large bathroom dealers.
Stack
What we built it on.
Timeline
How it unfolded.
Take stock
Map the undocumented shop: stack, infrastructure, risks. Get the team to a point where they know what they own.
Shape & staff
Concept for the form-to-render configurator, scope agreed with the founders, external developers sourced and hired.
First release
Laravel backend, React frontend, rendering algorithms driven by the form. First working version live in month five.
Merge & hand over
Technical diligence for the Conreal merger, third working version shipped, full handover to Conreal's CTO.
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