A wheel retailer · 2012 to today
Justin Zagar South Florida available now full-time, remote or hybrid
Lead product designer and design engineer
I make the screens a business runs on, like the ones a warehouse uses to find a wheel or a family uses to share a list, and I build the software behind them.
I design the interface and build the system underneath it.
Thirty years of it. The software I built for one wheel business has run it since 2012: 22,000+ orders, $3.5M+ in sales.
2012 to today
live now
The store is real and online today. The apps are recent. Each post shows the screens and why they look the way they do.
Apps
Visual Rim Search for AllOEMRims
Photograph a rim and the store tries to identify it. It says when it's only guessing.
Case study
Operator
An AI agent that answered the business phone line. Callers were verified before any order detail, and calls were filed as tickets.
Projects
Pocket Juke
Point it at your folders and it just plays, tags or no tags.
Projects
Splice
Visual Rim Search for AllOEMRims
Photograph a rim and the store tries to identify it. It says when it's only guessing.
Case study
Operator
An AI agent that answered the business phone line. Callers were verified before any order detail, and calls were filed as tickets.
Projects
Pocket Juke
Point it at your folders and it just plays, tags or no tags.
Projects
Splice
The long version
eight projects, start to finish
Each dot on this line is the same idea, rebuilt from scratch: a tool that takes the repeat work off somebody’s plate. Three of the stories below are on it. The rest are brand and product work from the same years, and the finished logos are under Brands.
2002
mySite
A district with eight schools and no way for any of them to change their own pages. I had started there at sixteen, still a student in the district. So I built a form: the school secretary filled in the principal's name, the phone number, the start and end times as radio buttons holding the three real answers, and it wrote the page back out. Two weeks start to finish. It cost nothing. Then I ran a session every month for any teacher who wanted to come, which is where the design actually got tested, because you find out very quickly which label is wrong when you are watching eight people fail at the same field.
Jump to the case study ↓2004
mySite Core 3
Rewritten in ASP.NET about three weeks after I came back to the district. It opened on a screen the first version never needed: Choose a site below to begin your editing session. One login across many sites, each showing when it was last updated, with a preview step before publishing. That is the version that outlived the school district. Through my freelance years the same bones got re-skinned client after client.
2004
ClientWire
Not a website. A reusable application shell (login, session security, a status and error library, roles, chrome) with per-client feature modules dropped into it. The proof it was a platform rather than a one-off is mechanical: across two unrelated deployments those shell files are byte-identical. The same shell ran a rental brand's customer complaint system and another client's back office.
Jump to the case study ↓
2006
Imagine
The first one that shipped to somebody who was not a school. It went live on 22 December 2006, managing thirty pages of a national car rental company's public website. I know the exact date because the software recorded it itself, and those rows are still in the database twenty years later.
Read the case study →2008
air
The productized one. It had a name in the browser title bar, two logotypes I drew, a version number printed in the chrome, and five releases. Around twenty client sites over six years, white-labeled so the client's logo sat at the top and the firm's name went in the footer. The admin files are byte-identical across unrelated clients, which is what makes it a product with a deployment procedure rather than a folder I copied around.
2013
Templatizer
One wheel record becomes a finished eBay and WooCommerce listing in minutes instead of hours. It has run the business for fourteen years, and a second retailer licensed it and ran it as a paying customer, hosted and maintained on our own server. Same conviction as the school form in 2002, aimed at a harder problem.
Jump to the case study ↓now
still shipping
AllOEMRims is winding down after fourteen years; the business is being sold. I am available now, full-time, remote or hybrid. The store is still online while it does. The conviction is not.
See what I am shipping now ↑How I think
Find the work that repeats.
If somebody does the same job by hand every day, that’s where I start.
Learned building AllOEMRims →Build the thing that takes it over.
The fix isn’t a faster person. It’s a tool that does the repeating part for them.
Learned building ClientWire →Hand the controls to the person closest to the job.
The secretary who knows the lunch menu should be the one who can change it.
Learned building Muskego-Norway →
A national car rental company · 2002 to 2009
Payless Car Rental
The problemSeven brands, each wanting its own look, and all of them still had to read as Payless.What I madeThe tagline system and print program that tied them together, the corporate site, and the complaint desk the company ran on. Read case study →
A batting glove seller · 2010 to 2016
Spiderz
The problemA competitor let shoppers color a glove in before buying it. My client didn’t have that.What I madeA glove builder where every color pick swaps one image, and a quote request when checkout couldn’t carry the order. Read case study →
A second wheel retailer · 2013 to 2016
Stock Rim
The problemAnother wheel shop wanted to run its warehouse and its listings on the software we’d built for ours.What I madeTwo licensed products, a warehouse tool and a listing generator, installed for them under a real license agreement. Read case study →
A tire shop owner’s idea · 2015 smartSHOP
The problemIn a store the size of an airfield, there’s nobody to ask where anything is.What I madeA store kiosk: a logo, nine screens and a working home page in nine days. It was never pitched. Read →
A car dealership · 2012 to 2018 Ely’s Automotive
The problemThe dealership next to the tire shop had the same owner and a different name.What I madeA new name and its logo, four websites, the van wrap, the building artwork and the sales paperwork. Read →
Payless franchise owners · 2004 ClientWire
The problemHead office couldn’t see how any of ninety locations treated a customer until a letter arrived.What I madeA complaint desk with a login for every location, where head office could see who was sitting on a complaint. Read →
My school district · 2002 Muskego-Norway School District
The problemHundreds of separate pages, and a parent had to already know which one had the lunch menu.What I mademySite, a form a school secretary filled in that built the page. 83 staff published their own. Read →1999 to 2013
historical project archive
29 sites and applications I built between 1999 and 2013, running right now. Not screenshots. The original code, running again, with the real records swapped for invented ones. Open one and use it: fill in the forms, sign into the admin behind it, break something.
These eight are where I would start. The rest, grouped by year →
Everything else
the rest of it
I am looking for a full-time role in product, web or brand design, or founding product engineering.
AllOEMRims is being sold after fourteen years, and I am available now. The case studies above are the long version. The resume is two pages, and the email goes straight to me.