Hawkr Zero

Hawkr · Unboxing

On-demand printed fan merch on clothes they already own. No new stock. No waste. No t-shirts size medium slowly turning into mouse bedding in the back corner of a warehouse.

Shopify App Sustainability Music API Integration

Year: 2025
Duration: ~3 months

Built with

Shopify custom app development
PHP API integration
Webhook architecture
Artist dashboard UX
Carbon impact reporting
Commission/profit-split calculations

Hawkr Zero dashboard inside Shopify admin, showing the artist's current orders, commission split, and carbon impact at a glance.

Role: Department of one
Worked with: Hawkr’s "other" guy
Hardest part: Fulfilment gymnastics
Backed by: Innovate UK grant

What was in the box

The brief

Band merch has a logistics problem nobody talks about. A label prints a few thousand shirts, trucks them to a venue, sells what it can, trucks the rest to the next gig, and repeats until whatever's left gets written off. Factor in returns, unsold stock, and the carbon cost of moving boxes of cotton around the country and it starts looking properly daft.

Hawkr's answer: skip the new garments entirely. Fans bring clothes they already own, the artist's design gets printed onto them. The concept works at live events - Hawkr already runs a PHP portal that handles artist registration, product creation, and fulfilment for concerts. Innovate UK backs them with a grant to build a Shopify app and take it online.

That's where I come in. I run the whole project - pitch, spec, design, build, QA, app store submission. I coordinate with Hawkr's existing portal developer on the API contract and handle everything on the Shopify side. One person, zero handoffs.

Before

Traditional merch

Print a few thousand shirts up front
Truck stock from venue to venue
Eat the cost of whatever doesn't sell
Process returns and sit on dead inventory

After

Nothing printed until a fan places an order
Fan brings their own garment
Zero speculative stock, zero returns
Artist sees the carbon saved on every order

First impressions

What I built

I built the Shopify app that bridged Hawkr's existing PHP portal and any installing artist's Shopify store. Artists pull their Hawkr-created designs into Shopify in one click. Orders placed through Shopify get pushed back to Hawkr for fulfilment via new API endpoints and webhooks I specced with Hawkr's engineers.

Inside Shopify, the artist's dashboard shows current orders, the commission split as pound values rather than percentages, and the carbon difference between each Zero Merch order and a traditional print run.

Shipped on the date he'd quoted, with everything we'd asked for. The grant milestone took care of itself.

- Jamie Monson (Hawkr founder)

Process

How the project ran

01 Nov 2024

Pitch

Scope and approach agreed with Hawkr.
02 Dec 2024

Kickoff

Spec, wireframes, and API contract drafted.
03 Dec 2024

Design

Artist dashboard and merchant install flow.
04 Jan 2025

Build

Shopify app, Hawkr integration, and webhooks.
05 Jan 2025

QA

End-to-end runs against the Hawkr portal.
06 Feb 2025

Live

Real sales at a real gig.

Teardown

Under the hood

Double-OAuth install flow: Shopify app auth and Hawkr portal auth handled in a single merchant onboarding journey.
Hawkr's three-leg fulfilment flow mapped onto Shopify's single-outbound-shipment order model, with customer-facing status emails at each leg.
One-click import of Hawkr-built designs into Shopify with product metadata preserved.
Artist dashboard built as an embedded Shopify admin surface, so artists don't have to leave their store to check orders, commission, or carbon impact.
Contract-tested webhook and API integration between Shopify and the Hawkr portal.

The outcome

What shipped

Phase one shipped at the end of January, on schedule for Hawkr's Innovate UK grant milestone. It ran live at a gig in February with a real artist, real fans, and real sales. That was the first time the Hawkr Zero model had been deployed through Shopify.

The result is a Shopify app any artist on Shopify can install, plug into Hawkr, and start offering print-on-fan-clothing merch alongside their existing catalogue. Hawkr gets to open their model up to a market segment their PHP portal couldn't reach, without rebuilding the back end.

FAQ

Questions & answers

Why a Shopify app instead of a theme integration?

An app lets Hawkr ship the whole model to any artist in one install, with a proper admin surface and first-class data sync back to the PHP portal. A theme integration would have been faster to build but locked to whichever theme the artist happened to be running, and brittle on every theme update.

Who owned the API design?

I drafted the contract end-to-end and iterated with Hawkr's existing portal developer. They implemented the portal side, I implemented the Shopify side, and the contract tests we agreed on kept both ends honest.

What was the hardest part?

Fulfilment. A single Hawkr order moves through three shipments, not one. First, Hawkr send out a pack pre-addressed back to themselves. The fan puts the garment they want printed on inside it and sends it back. Hawkr inspect it to confirm it'll take the print, apply the design, and ship the finished item to the fan. Shopify's order model assumes one outbound shipment per order, and making it represent that three-leg journey without breaking the admin view or confusing the customer in their automated emails was where most of the thinking went.

Can this be adapted for a different client?

The integration layer is Hawkr-specific by design, but the architecture around it transfers. The key piece is the double-OAuth layer. The Shopify app runs two OAuth flows at install: one against Shopify as a standard app, and one against a third-party service on behalf of the installing merchant. Any Shopify app that needs to bridge a merchant's Shopify store with a separate SaaS account uses that same pattern, which covers a lot of common integrations. The Shopify app scaffolding, dashboard patterns, and API-contract process are all reusable too.

Frequently bought together

Want this for your store?

The services that built Hawkr Zero, available as a bundle.

Product 01

Custom App Development

When off-the-shelf apps don't cut it.

From £12,000

Product 02

Ongoing Support & Maintenance

A developer on retainer. Like having a CTO, but affordable.

From £2,000/month

Bundle total

From £14,000

Discuss your project

★★★★★ Would build again

"Shipped on time for the gig it was built for."

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