Shops that sell engraved signs, cutting boards or keyrings get the customer's personalization as free text at checkout. Someone then reads each order, retypes the text into a design file, resizes it by eye, exports it, guesses a filename and carries it to a laser or printer. At a few orders a day that is tedious. In the busy season it becomes the whole business — and it is where the typos happen. A misspelled name means scrap material, a refund and a bad review. The client wanted that manual chain gone, with a check before anything is cut, and a system that agencies running several shops could use too.
Personalized products & manufacturing · Case study
KegaCraft: order automation for personalized engraving and print shops
A multi-tenant platform that takes personalized orders from online marketplaces, checks them, turns them into production-ready engraving and print files and sends each one to the right machine — without anyone retyping a name.
- Client
- A personalized products & manufacturing company in Germany
- Industry
- Personalized products & manufacturing
- Year
- 2026
- Duration
- Live since Sept 2026
- Location
- Germany
We built KegaCraft as a Python/FastAPI back end with PostgreSQL, background workers and a Next.js dashboard in German and English. • Orders arrive automatically from the shop (Shopify connected live; adapters for Amazon, Etsy, eBay and TikTok Shop are built). • Each order is merged into a versioned design template. • A quality check runs before production: text too long for the engraving area, characters the font cannot render, photos too small to print. • A pricing rules engine, an approval workflow for risky orders, and inventory and material tracking. • Production files are rendered as SVG, DXF, EPS or PDF — including UV flatbed print files with named spot inks and white plates — and two-sided products come out as one file per side. • One workshop PC connects all the machines, with a folder per machine; staff drag orders onto a machine and send the file straight to it. • Multi-tenant from the first migration, so one agency can run many shops under its own brand.
Results
- ≈1.5 sOrder to production fileImport, check, price, render and route — unattended.
- 4Production formatsSVG, DXF, EPS and PDF for lasers and UV printers.
- 1,000+Automated testsBack end and front end, run on every change.
Check before you cut
Most mistakes in personalized production are only found once the material is ruined. KegaCraft validates every order against its template first — does the text fit the engraving area, can the font draw every character, is the photo sharp enough — and holds anything doubtful in a review queue that says exactly why.
From order to machine, unattended
A paid order is imported, checked, priced, rendered and placed in the hot folder of the machine that will make it, in about a second and a half — without anyone clicking through it. Production staff see a ready queue, drag orders onto machines and press start on a file whose name maps straight back to the order.
Built for many shops at once
Every table, query, endpoint and background task is tenant-aware from day one. An agency can connect several sellers, keep their data fully separate and offer the tool under its own brand.
Secure enough for the marketplaces
Marketplaces set strict rules for anyone handling their buyers' data. Stored files and database backups are encrypted, backups are pruned nightly, data is kept only for agreed retention periods, and staff sign in in two steps.
We run the servers
KegaCraft runs on an EU-hosted VPS that we set up and operate. The API, the dashboard, the background workers, the scheduler and the file storage each run as their own system service and restart on failure. PostgreSQL and Redis listen only inside the server, secrets are generated on the machine and never stored in the code, TLS certificates renew automatically, and encrypted database backups are taken and pruned every night. The server is shared with another live product, so every change is planned to leave it untouched.
Tested, then shipped
More than 150 API routes across 44 tables are covered by over a thousand automated tests on the back end and the front end, and every screen passes an accessibility check in German and English, on a 390 px phone and at 200 % zoom. KegaCraft has been live in production in Germany since September 2026, on EU-hosted infrastructure, with new features shipping every week.
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