WHOISRISHAV
WHOISRISHAV
Anirban Mandal Pictures is a full-stack e-commerce platform built for Anirban Mandal, an internationally awarded painter and photographer whose work has appeared in National Geographic and been collected by buyers on five continents.
Before this build, his originals, prints and artist-designed apparel were sold in person, at a gallery-store in Newtown, Kolkata and a former Shop-in-Shop at Oxford Bookstore on Park Street. Collectors from outside India had no way to browse or buy the work online. The brief was to design and build a store that felt as considered as a gallery, while giving him a simple admin panel to manage the catalogue and orders himself.
I led end-to-end development of the platform through Northbound Labs, covering architecture, the customer storefront, the admin dashboard and the production deployment, from the first wireframe to the store going live.
Anirban Mandal's photography and paintings have been published in National Geographic UK & USA, and recognized across a decade of the world's most prestigious contests. The store had to carry that weight without ever getting in front of the work itself.
Every customer-facing detail was designed to feel like walking through the gallery in Newtown: unhurried, image-first, and easy to trust with an international card.
Gallery-style browsing across paintings (oil, acrylic, pastel, watercolor, alcohol ink), fine art prints and apparel, filterable by category.
High-resolution image zoom on every piece, so collectors can inspect brushwork and texture before buying.
A slide-out cart drawer that shows customers how close they are to free shipping, encouraging larger orders.
Cash on Delivery by default, with Stripe and Razorpay wired in for international and Indian card payments.
Registration, login and order history so returning collectors can track past and current purchases.
A first-order discount flow to convert new visitors browsing from outside India into first-time buyers.
Anirban isn't a developer, so the admin experience had to be simple enough to manage without support tickets.
At-a-glance stats on orders, revenue and inventory the moment he logs in.
Add, edit and retire paintings, prints and t-shirts, with drag-and-drop image upload compressed automatically via Sharp.
A status pipeline (pending → paid → processing → shipped → delivered) updated with one click per order.
He uploads one painting and the platform renders it hanging in every room scene in the library, turning a single image into a full product gallery.
The same upload gets superimposed onto every garment base, in any style and colour, with the print area positioned wherever he wants it.
The admin panel sits behind its own authenticated route, separate from the customer-facing app.
Photographing every painting in a frame, on a wall, and again on five t-shirt colours was never going to happen. So product imagery is generated, not shot. Anirban uploads the artwork once and a Sharp compositing pipeline builds the rest of the catalogue for him.
Each room background in the library stores its frame opening as fractions of the image, not fixed pixels, so one scene works at any resolution. The pipeline reads the artwork's dimensions, detects whether it's portrait or landscape, and picks the matching frame zone automatically, then resizes to fit and composites it into place. Pick the scenes, get back one catalogue-ready image per room.
Every garment base carries its own print zone, which he can override per design to move or resize the print exactly where he wants it. Artwork without transparency gets its white background trimmed automatically, and the blend mode switches on garment colour, multiply on white so the fabric texture shows through, normal on dark. One pass renders every style and colour combination.
There are two entry points: a preview run that returns mockups to review, and a commit run that generates the images and creates the product with its colour and size variants in a single call.
The palette and type system were built to let the artwork stay the focus: near-black canvas backgrounds, a warm gold accent, and a serif that reads like a gallery placard.
A deliberately lean stack (file-based SQLite in development, MySQL in production) so the whole platform runs comfortably on affordable shared Node.js hosting instead of a monthly bill the gallery would have to justify.
Artwork © Anirban Mandal, used with permission as part of the platform built for him.
Real notes from collectors who found and bought the work through the new store.
I was busy looking at the beautiful prints, thank you so much. I really love them. All are very beautiful shots but none feel as magic and colourful as the women in Varanasi.
All pictures of your collection are very very very beautiful… especially the 'Unnatural' series is really beautiful. But till now your Banyan tree photograph has touched me most.
Okay… I want that (The Sunset Boat) for my home.
I am taking this for my Switzerland home.
I take on a small number of independent projects each year, from e-commerce to full product builds.