Havaianas Boardwalk Store

Client: Havaianas | Role: Developer & Lead Technologist

The Challenge: Making a Mural Shoppable

How do you turn a static piece of street art into a dynamic, interactive storefront? For their Venice Beach boardwalk campaign, Havaianas wanted to create a "shoppable mural" that would seamlessly bridge the gap between physical art and digital commerce, captivating a notoriously hard-to-impress audience. The challenge was to invent a technology experience that felt instant, intuitive, and magical.

The Solution: An AI-Powered Web App

As the sole developer, I engineered the end-to-end technical solution that brought this vision to life. The system had two core components:

1. A Custom Machine Learning Model: Using Google's Vision API, I trained a custom ML model on-site. Just days before the launch, I worked with the production team to capture hundreds of photos of the murals from every conceivable angle and lighting condition. I then manually classified each section of the art to correspond with a specific style of Havaianas' famous flip-flops.
2. An Instant Web Application: I designed and developed a responsive web app in React, Next.js, and TypeScript. The app used browser-based camera APIs to create a fluid, real-time capture experience. When a user photographed a section of the mural, the image was instantly uploaded to a custom AWS EC2 backend, which processed it through the Google Vision ML model for classification.

The User Experience

The journey was designed to be effortless. A person walking the boardwalk, captivated by the art, could simply:

1. Scan a QR code to launch the web app.
2. Point their phone's camera at any part of the mural.
3. Instantly receive a redirect to the exact Havaianas e-commerce page for the stylistically matching sandals, ready for purchase.

My Role: The Technical Hub of a Creative Campaign

On a project with a tight, immovable deadline, my biggest challenge was not just technical but logistical. I served as the central hub connecting the technology to the fast-paced, real-world production. This required deep coordination with the artist, photographers, creative directors, and marketing teams, ensuring the ML model and web platform were developed in perfect sync with the campaign's every move.