Brand site . Correctness-critical
Sebastian Watch Co
An editorial brand site and a provably fair drop engine for an independent watchmaker
- fair draws
- Provablyfair draws
- irreversibility
- One-shotirreversibility
- phases shipped
- 2phases shipped
Status. Editorial site live. Drop engine feature-complete in production.
Visit sebastianwatchco.comWhat it is
An artisanal Indian watch brand releasing small numbered editions to a global collector audience. We built the editorial site and the drop engine behind its releases: a timed entry window, a verifiably fair draw, and winner notification.
The problem
Earlier drops ran over Instagram DMs and broke publicly. Instagram timestamps resolve only to the minute and latency is random, so first come first served had no fair way to decide who actually arrived first. The complaints landed on the same channel running the sale.
The brand needed a draw anyone could verify, on its own domain, with no dependency on a social platform.
How it runs
What we built
A brand website: hero, collection grid, and a product detail page per watch with gallery, specs, and edition story.
A founder-operated content admin with full CRUD for watches, collections, and site configuration, usable locally without any cloud credentials and writing straight to production data when live.
A timed entry window for each drop, with server-stamped timestamps, duplicate detection, bot protection, and a honeypot field.
A deterministic Fisher-Yates draw seeded from a SHA-256 hash of the drop's close timestamp and a publicly announced salt, so anyone holding the entry list can rerun the exact draw and get the same winners.
Two independent random streams, one for winner selection and one for piece-number assignment, so the two cannot be correlated against each other.
A one-shot draw enforced at the database layer: a uniqueness constraint means a second run fails outright, so the draw cannot be quietly re-rolled.
A winner gate with a token-gated confirmation window, and non-winners automatically folded into the next drop's waitlist.
Notable engineering
A provably fair lottery. The seed comes from a value that does not exist until the entry window closes, combined with a salt published weeks earlier, so neither the brand nor any entrant can know the outcome in advance. The draw stays open for anyone to re-verify.
Idempotency enforced at the database layer, not in application code. The uniqueness constraint makes a second draw attempt structurally impossible rather than merely discouraged.
A dual-mode data layer that reads local files in development and a hosted database in production behind the same interface, so the site can be built and demoed with zero cloud dependency.
A close-to-zero-cost production stack, warmed automatically ahead of each drop to remove cold-start risk on the day it matters most.
Stack
Capabilities demonstrated
The draw mechanism is not a black box. Run it yourself on the fair draw demo with sample entrants and see the same algorithm end to end.
Have a build in mind?
Tell us what you are trying to ship. We will tell you plainly whether we are the right fit.