Airfare

The Startup

Airfare is an e-commerce startup selling nutritious plant-based snacks packaged for air travel. They launched on out-of-the-box Shopify but quickly outgrew it. We came on board to help evolve their platform from a basic single-product store into a robust subscription-based e-commerce experience.

From Single Orders to Subscriptions

The first major shift was building out a subscription model called "Flight Crew" — targeted specifically at pilots and flight attendants who needed reliable, healthy snack deliveries on a recurring basis.

We restructured the site to lead with subscription tiers as the primary product, repositioning single pouch purchases as a low-commitment trial.

Custom Snack Browser

• Multi-criteria filtering by brand, dietary needs, and ingredient categories
• Detailed product modals with full nutrition facts, ingredients, and brand stories
• Favorites system letting users save preferred snacks across sessions
• Mobile-optimized layout since 65% of traffic came from phones

Account Dashboard

The trickiest engineering challenge was the account management system. Subscription orders ran through ReCharge while single purchases stayed on Shopify — two completely separate data sources that needed to feel like one unified experience.

• Unified order history pulling from both Shopify and ReCharge APIs
• Subscription management — pause, cancel, edit shipping dates, update payment methods
• Cross-platform sync ensuring changes reflected in both Shopify and ReCharge
• Smart notifications with nav badge indicators for unredeemed rewards

The Takeaway

The platform evolved from a simple Shopify store into a full subscription commerce experience — and we got to build every layer of that evolution.