CLEAQUES — diaspora marketplace for African producers

Context

CLEAQUES set out to connect African producers and service providers to African expats in the US and Canada: a diaspora marketplace bridging community, cultural commerce, and small-business support. The build needed to handle multi-currency listings, vendor onboarding, and a buyer experience that respected both sides of the Atlantic.

Problem

A diaspora marketplace lives or dies on trust: vendors need a clean store experience, buyers need confidence in the listings, and the platform owner needs admin controls without fighting the framework. Off-the-shelf marketplace plugins didn’t fit the cultural-commerce shape of the catalogue.

Approach

A Laravel + Blade build with custom theming on top of a marketplace data model designed for the diaspora use case. Server-rendered templates over a heavier SPA, because the audience reach matters more than client-side interactivity.

Solution

• Laravel application with Blade templating for the storefront and admin surfaces.
• Vendor onboarding and product-listing flows with admin moderation.
• Theme customization layered on a base marketplace shell: product cards, category navigation, and storefront pages tuned for the diaspora catalogue.
• Currency and locale handling for cross-border transactions.

Outcome

Above. The platform launched and is live at cleaques.com; the producer-to-diaspora connection is the load-bearing user story and the storefront is where most of the engineering investment landed.