What types of businesses does Shelter 84 work with?

Founders launching new brands, local LA businesses (restaurants, dentists, real estate, retail), and operators modernizing existing companies. We have shipped work for peptide brands, sober living operators, family-run businesses, and entertainment-industry clients. If you can describe what you are building, we can scope it.

How much do projects typically cost?

Engagements start at $1,500. A logo and brand identity package starts at $5,000. A full e-commerce store with payments and SEO starts at $10,000. A complete brand identity program with brand book is $30,000 and up. We send a fixed-price proposal after a 30-minute call. No hourly billing, no surprise invoices.

How fast can Shelter 84 launch a brand?

Most projects ship in 2 to 4 weeks. We offer Brand In A Day for founders who need a name, voice, identity, and landing page in a single week. Our Storefront Sprint delivers a live e-commerce store with payments and age verification in 2 to 3 weeks. Speed is one of our edges.

Do you help local restaurants get on Uber Eats and DoorDash?

Yes. That is our Local Modernization Pack starting at $3,000. We optimize your Uber Eats and DoorDash catalogs or set them up from scratch, clean up your Google Business profile, build SMS automation, and audit your Google reviews flow. Most local operators see meaningful revenue lift in 30 to 60 days without changing their menu.

What makes Shelter 84 different from a regular agency?

We do brand, web, AI, and operations under one roof. Most founders hire four different vendors to do what we deliver as one connected system. We have launched our own ventures, a peptide brand, a wellness app, a sober living operation, and a holding company, so we build for founders the way we build for ourselves. You own everything when we are done. No agency lock-in.

ANKR

DTC · Wellness · Full brand build

A complete DTC commerce and operations system, built from naming to fulfillment.

ANKR launched as a brand, a store, an affiliate engine, a COA library, and an operational backend that runs itself. Built end-to-end by Shelter 84.

The problem

ANKR's founder had a clear product thesis and zero infrastructure to bring it to market. The category was sensitive enough that off-the-shelf Shopify wouldn't work, the customer base needed an affiliate program to grow, and the operational realities (alternative payments, certificate-of-analysis tracking, automated fulfillment) meant a generic e-commerce build was a non-starter.

The choice was hire four different vendors — branding agency, e-commerce developer, ops consultant, copywriter — or hire one team that does all of it as one connected system.

What we built

Brand and identity

Full naming strategy. Brand name, product names (Wolverine, KLOW, GLOW), category positioning.
Visual identity system. Logo, color, typography, packaging.
Brand voice guide. Precision, quiet authority, research-first, premium without distance.
All marketing collateral. Decks, OG images, retail-ready displays, social templates.

E-commerce platform

Custom WooCommerce build, fully owned by the founder.
Alternative payment integrations beyond Stripe — crypto, Cash App, Zelle.
Age-gate compliance for the category.
Five-tier affiliate commission system, fully integrated with the storefront and admin.
Certificate-of-Analysis (COA) library, tied to product variants, with batch upload tooling.
Custom checkout flow. Inventory wired to actual physical stock counts.

Operational backend

Automated fulfillment workflow. New order triggers the right downstream steps.
Zelle payment parsing. Inbound payment notifications match to orders automatically.
Transactional email flows. Order confirmation, shipping, COA delivery, affiliate payouts.
Internal admin console with batch operations, supplier filtering, and date-range tools.

Financial modeling

May to Feb pro forma with 288 working formulas. Live cash flow, P&L, and inventory projection.
Revenue and expense assumptions wired to real category data, editable in one input panel.

Ongoing systems

AI operator install. Project memory, weekly automated briefs, scheduled background tasks.
Sales infrastructure. Pipeline tracker, prospect lists, weekly sales review automation.

Why it works

Three reasons this engagement landed where most agency builds drift.

One: it was always one system, never two integrations. The brand, the store, the affiliate engine, the ops backend, and the AI layer were designed together. No "we'll wire that up later." The COA library knows about product variants because it was built to. The Zelle parser knows about order numbers because the email template was built to include them. Integrations that look invisible to the founder are invisible because they were planned, not retrofitted.

Two: we worked at the speed the category required. Wellness and supplement DTC moves fast. The window between "this could work" and "someone else launched it" is short. By compressing brand, store, affiliate, and ops into one engagement, ANKR launched in weeks rather than the typical six-month agency-developer-consultant relay race.

Three: the founder owns everything. The codebase, the brand assets, the operational documentation, the AI brief system. We don't lock founders into our maintenance. We build it to be handed over, and we stay on retainer only when it's the right call for the founder, not the only option.

Where it stands

Live at ankrlab.com.

The brand, store, affiliate program, COA system, and operational backend are all in active use. The AI operator continues to flag what's slipping in weekly briefs. The studio remains on retainer for system maintenance and growth-stage builds.

What this case study proves about Shelter 84

This is the full ceiling. Brand + commerce + ops + AI as one system. We can do any single piece of this for other clients, or we can do the whole stack.

Most engagements don't need all of it on day one. But every founder building something real eventually needs more than just a logo. ANKR is the proof that we can be the team that grows with you, not the four vendors you have to coordinate.

Working on something at this scale? Schedule a call.