Toquinho Estampas: how I turned my dad's 30-year silk-screen shop into a self-service AI-powered storefront
My parents run a screen-printing shop in Divinópolis. They always have. That's why I care whether technology actually works.
I grew up watching my father run Toquinho Estampas — a silk-screen printing shop in Divinópolis, Minas Gerais. 30 years in business. The shop serves local businesses, schools, and event organizers who need custom-printed garments.
The business model has a fundamental constraint: the custom design consultation is the bottleneck. Every potential customer who wants to see what their logo would look like on a shirt needs to go through my dad. Customers often wait days for a mockup.
The question wasn't "how do I build something impressive?" It was "what would actually save my father time and bring him more orders?"
A self-service design tool: customers describe or upload, see it on a garment in 30 seconds, and submit an order — no consultation required
The AI image generation layer handles the "design on garment" mockup — given a customer-provided description or logo, it generates a photorealistic render of the printed garment. This isn't perfect art direction, but it's good enough for a sports club to say "yes, that's the look we want."
The Supabase backend handles the order queue, customer accounts, and order status. When an order is submitted with an approved mockup, it goes directly into my father's production queue.