Director's Cut: how this store was built

01 · The brief

A store, not a PDF

I didn't want a PDF with a nicer font. The brief I wrote down had five rules:

• Projects run here. A model you can play and a tool you can try, without being sent somewhere else.
• It outlives the job search. New projects drop in without a redesign.
• It feels like me. Sneakers, tennis, four languages, three continents.
• Recruiters get a fast lane. The play is optional; the facts never are.
• Measure everything, identify no one. Count visits, not people.

02 · The concept

The one that was already my job

I looked at a few directions before choosing the obvious one. At Under Armour's first intelligent flagship in Guangzhou, I measured how people move through a store. So this site is a store. You walk in through the headline, the projects are zones on a floor plan, the resume is the register, and a door sensor counts footfall in the band at the top of the page.

03 · The build

Six decisions that shaped it

The headline walks in

The first draft said "Retail, measured." It looked sharp and said nothing about me. It read like a product launch, not a person. Now it says "Welcome in, I'm Sener." The comma stands up as a stick figure, walks across the line and steps through a door that used to be the period. Every time he walks in, a new line rotates in. On a phone he waits by the open door instead, and if your device asks for reduced motion, nobody moves at all.

A manager on duty

A photo and a name badge, because a store with nobody in it is a warehouse.

A floor plan made of data

Every project is a zone sized by its format: SPLUS for the big ones, S for standard, D for small, TBA for whatever is still in the back. The zones pack themselves onto a twelve-column grid, and any space left over becomes "Next drop" hoarding. Adding a project means adding a few lines to one file. Adding a floor adds a button to the elevator.

A real door sensor

The counter at the top is live. It counts visits with a random id that lives in your browser tab and nowhere else: no cookies, no IP addresses, nothing that identifies you. The heat on the floor plan starts as my forecast of where visitors will spend their time, and switches to real dwell once fifty visits have been counted. Forecast against actual, like any floorset review. Rest your cursor on a zone and a clock starts for that stop while its heat pulses and grows. Step away and it settles, leaving a little warmth behind. Come back and the clock starts over in hard-court blue, while the details panel keeps your running total. Under a second is a pass-by and doesn't count. Most walk past, some walk in.

Signs in four languages

The store's signage switches between English, Turkish, French and Chinese. The content stays in English. The signs are there because those are the languages I work in, and because a flagship should greet everyone who walks in.

An express lane

One page, thirty seconds, everything a recruiter needs. The full tour is there for anyone who wants to play.

04 · What got cut

The cutting-room floor

• Retail, measuredThe first headline. Clean, and nobody's in particular.
• Melbourne, the placeI've never lived there. Its public footfall data supplies the traffic side of my store-scaling model instead.
• A Les Benjamins zoneThe internship was real, but there are no documents to show, so it lives on the resume.
• A fixed floor planThe first plan had rooms of fixed sizes. It couldn't grow, so it went.
• The shortest domainsener.me was the plan until it turned out to be taken. senergunsel.com is longer, and unmistakably mine.

05 · How it was made

Directed, not dragged and dropped

I directed the build with Claude: the brief and the concepts in conversation, the mockups on a design canvas, then the code in Claude Code. The store runs on Cloudflare, with static pages for the floor and a small Worker and Durable Object behind the door sensor. The code lives in a public repository, and its history is the uncut version of this note.

Next on the notice board: a store walk-through and a drop breakdown.