How Roastify enabled packaging personalization for modern brands
Roastify runs a physical coffee operation in Bend, Oregon – roasting, packaging, and fulfilling orders – and a tech platform that lets creators and brands design and sell custom coffee products. From the start, they needed a simple but powerful way for non-designers to create real, print-ready packaging without using tools like Photoshop or Figma. Anyone joining Roastify had to be able to launch a coffee line fast, with no design skills and no friction. Building an editor internally made no sense because it would take too much time, cost too much, and distract from their actual business. They needed something easy for users, flexible for developers, and stable enough to support real production work. Polotno SDK fit that need immediately.
Roastify built its product around Polotno from day one. Customers design packaging in the browser, the platform saves and edits JSON programmatically, and those designs move straight into the roasting and fulfillment pipeline. Polotno sits at the core of that flow and supports the entire system.
A packaging workflow that demanded simplicity, speed, and zero design expertise
Roastify had two urgent needs at launch. The first was user experience. Their audience isn’t made of professional designers. It’s influencers, micro-brands, local businesses, repeat buyers, and people who want to sell something personal and unique – but who would immediately churn if the platform required pro-level tooling. Asking customers to exchange emails, upload mockups, or wait for a design review cycle was a non-starter. Roastify needed an editor that felt familiar on first use, required no onboarding, and could scale from simple layouts to full production packaging.
The second need was deeply technical: Roastify had to control the editor programmatically. Their team wanted to manipulate designs, update layers with dynamic content, push changes from backend APIs, and run server-side rendering pipelines that could generate consistent print files and 3D mockups. That meant they needed complete access to design data and a reliable rendering engine that could operate both in-browser and in an automated environment.
They briefly considered building an editor internally, but the cost, complexity, and long-term maintenance requirements quickly killed the idea. Even as a development-heavy founding team, it simply made no business sense. They needed something flexible, transparent, stable, and deeply extensible – without sinking months or years of engineering effort into replicating a solved problem.
On top of this, Roastify started as a bootstrapped venture. Cash flow mattered. Any solution had to be powerful enough to carry the entire product experience, while staying within a budget that didn’t force them into an impossible tradeoff between growth and infrastructure. The editor couldn’t be a luxury. It had to be the backbone.
In an instant: switching on a robust design experience
Polotno SDK slotted directly into Roastify's requirements without compromises. The initial integration was immediate – the kind of “it just works” moment that allows a small technical team to build momentum instead of fighting foundational tools. Within days, Roastify had a working editor running in their product. Over the following weeks, they extended it with templates, image uploads, versioning, and backup systems using Polotno’s store events and JSON architecture.
Polotno’s simplicity proved to be a major strategic advantage. Users with zero design experience were able to build packaging instantly, while developers had clean access to elements, layer names, and state updates. Roastify created a system where a user-generated design could be modified programmatically: placeholder text swapped through API calls, images updated on the fly, and JSON pushed through Puppeteer-style server rendering to generate final print and mockup assets. This dual-mode usage – front-end creativity and back-end automation – became a core part of Roastify's offering.
As the company evolved, their technical demands increased. Moving to React 19 surfaced legacy UI dependencies and bundling conflicts, and Polotno’s team stepped in to help solve them. The collaboration was direct, practical, and responsive – the kind of interaction that gives a small tech team confidence that the foundation they’re building on will keep pace with them.
Roastify now uses Polotno not just as a designer, but as a core infrastructure block: something that can power front-end design, automated back-end pipelines, and even future partner integrations as Roastify positions itself to become the fulfillment and backend layer behind other coffee-branding apps built by external creators.
Completing business objectives while driving user satisfaction
Polotno became an important pillar of Roastify's product strategy. The editor is the entry point for merchants, the interface for creative experimentation, and the data model behind automated rendering and fulfillment. It lets Roastify operate a two-sided business: a physical roasting and packaging facility on one end, and a scalable digital platform on the other. That unified flow exists because the editor is stable, simple, predictable, and completely accessible at the JSON level.
Roastify now supports two distinct user groups. The first is traditional merchants who log in, design packaging directly in the editor, and purchase coffee with their brand assets applied. The second is a fast-growing segment of developers, AI-tool builders, and automation-driven creators who want to generate packaging programmatically. Polotno lets Roastify serve both equally well.
The long-term value shows up in strategic outcomes. Roastify is preparing for a future where more design work happens through LLM-driven instructions, automated prompts, and dynamic asset generation. Their goal is not to replace the editor, but to offer both manual and automated creation paths powered by the same underlying JSON engine. Polotno’s architecture makes this possible without locking them into a proprietary AI service or forcing them to rewrite their core editor.
Even internal operations benefit. The roasting and packaging team can rely on consistent output from automated renderers. The technical team can deploy new features without rewriting the editor stack. And the business team can focus on scaling the fulfillment side of the company, knowing the design experience is stable and extensible.
Roastify never had to migrate from a legacy system or rebuild from scratch. Polotno has been their editor from day one – and has grown with them as they evolved from a bootstrap idea into a profitable hybrid tech-and-fulfillment business.