I make things from reclaimed and coppiced wood. Every material has a story — where it came from, why it was taken, what it was before. When someone buys something from me, they're not just buying an object. They're buying the fact that it came from a specific location, it had a life before it became what it is today, and that there will only ever be one just like it. It's a specific, traceable thing.

Etsy can't really tell that story. Neither can a Shopify template. You get a product listing, a title, a description box, and a photo. The platform is the frame, and the frame doesn't change. Every shop looks like every other shop, and you're competing on a marketplace where the algorithm decides who gets seen.

That wasn't going to work for Bough & Burrow. So I built my own site.

What I actually built

The site runs on Next.js for the frontend — that's the part you see and interact with. It's a modern web framework that produces fast, well-structured pages. Underneath that is Medusa, an open-source e-commerce backend. Think of it as the engine that handles products, orders, payments, and stock — without the monthly fees or the opinionated branding of platforms like Shopify.

The whole thing is self-hosted via a tool called Dokploy, which means it runs on a server I control rather than on someone else's platform.

Payments go through Stripe, which is the same payment processor most big e-commerce sites use — rock solid, widely trusted.

Blog posts and editorial content are managed through Sanity CMS, and product photos are served via Bunny CDN, which optimises them automatically for fast loading — converting to modern formats like AVIF and WebP depending on your browser.

Every piece of software in the stack — Next.js, Medusa, Dokploy — is open-source. That means the code is publicly available, auditable, and maintained by communities rather than corporations with a commercial interest in locking you in. For a business built on transparency and provenance, that felt right.

The servers themselves run on 100% renewable energy in European datacentres.

It's far from a simple setup. But it's mine, entirely.

Why bother?

A few reasons really:

Fees. Etsy takes a listing fee, a transaction fee, a payment processing fee, and increasingly, an advertising fee whether you opt in or not. When you're selling handmade items at the margins this work produces, that adds up fast. Running my own infrastructure costs a fraction of that over time and enables me to host other projects that I am working on.

Data. On a marketplace, customer data belongs to the platform. I can't email someone who bought from me two years ago to tell them I've got new stock. On my own site, I build a direct relationship with customers.

The story. I wanted a site that could carry the full narrative of what Bough & Burrow is — the conservation volunteering at 100 Acer, the provenance of individual materials, potential collaborations and sharing my process. A product card on Etsy gets you 10 photos and a text box. A proper website gets you as much space as the story needs.

Longevity. Platforms change. Etsy's fee structure in 2026 is nothing like it was in 2014. Algorithms shift. Shops get buried and even shut down after years of trading. I didn't want to build something and then have the ground move under it.

The beta process

Before going live properly, I’m running a closed beta. A small group of people with access to the site to test the buying experience, find broken things, and give feedback. To keep it interesting, I built in a couple of Easter eggs — hidden interactions that reward people who explore. I'm not going to say what they are here, but if you poke around the site long enough, you'll find them.

The beta will help surface real issues that I might not have caught on my own, because I know the site too well. Fresh eyes matter.

Was it worth it?

Ask me again in a year. Right now, yes — I have a site that does exactly what I need it to do, that I understand inside out, and that I can extend as the business grows.


boughandburrow.uk is currently in beta. If you've found your way here already, thanks for being early.