Have you ever heard of “Bob’s House of Discount Beans in Botswana”? I’m not surprised if you haven’t, because I just made it up. But if Bob’s business exists, it needs to do the same fundamental things as any business: manage inventory, collect payment, ship orders, and keep customer data in sync. These are the foundational capabilities that every business must rely upon. But how you execute them, can also create opportunities for integration across business lines, generating synergy that you can channel into growth and innovation.
Additionally our business isn’t just digital; it is fundamentally physical. Our “backend” is a real-world warehouse, a card in a grading queue, a box on a truck. A customer’s order isn’t just a row in a database; it is navigating a multi-day physical process managed by expert practitioners of a highly specialized craft — grading our customers’ unique collectibles.
The challenge, therefore, was twofold:
- How do we unify our portfolio of brands to reduce duplicate work and create new, cross-vertical product opportunities?
- How do we bridge the gap between our complex asynchronous physical operations and the seamless, high-leverage digital experiences for our collectors?
Our solution had to mirror how our business actually works. Our platform had to be event-driven because our business is event-driven. We call it CORE: Centralized Orchestration & Reliable Execution.
Bridging the Physical and Digital Worlds
Picture a common scenario: a customer places an order to have a card graded and then shipped home. To make this work, the Order service, the Grading service, and the Shipping service must all coordinate.
The most direct way to build this is with point-to-point integrations. The Order service calls the Grading service, which needs to store the address and then call the Shipping service when the order is completed. This is a logical first step, but as we scale, it creates new challenges. The Grading service, for example, suddenly gets polluted with shipping-address data it doesn’t need, just so it can pass it along. As we add new products, this web of connections becomes complex and can make future changes slow and risky.
A traditional solution to this complexity is a monolithic orchestration service that manages the entire workflow via synchronous REST calls. This service would make a synchronous REST call to Grading, poll the Grading database for days until the order is completed, then call Shipping. This centralizes the logic, but it introduces a new set of challenges. It can become a central bottleneck, and it’s vulnerable to downstream failures. A single, temporary timeout in one service can cause the entire chain to fail, leading to data inconsistencies and a poor customer experience.
A More Resilient Path: The CORE Platform
CORE was designed as the antidote to these patterns. It is a decoupled, event-driven platform that is built to mirror the asynchronous, physical reality of our business.
Instead of fragile, synchronous calls, we use the durable, ordered guarantees of Kafka to make a promise that a business event, like an order being placed, will be handled. If a downstream system that we depend on, such as our payment systems, are slow or offline, the event simply waits. We never lose a transaction. This gives us ironclad reliability and the ability to replay any workflow, which is critical for both safeguarding our collectors’ valuable items and making sure that they are able to do what they want with them.
This architecture is what allows us to decouple our product teams from our complex operational backend. We do this by providing a simple, shared language for the business, which we call “Capabilities.”
A product team doesn’t need to know the internal logic of our accounting, payment, or shipping systems. They just use a unified capability like I want to ship, I want to pay, or I want to vault. CORE handles the rest. This frees our stream-aligned teams to innovate. They can rapidly prototype new product ideas without ever worrying about the nuances of our operational systems.
When one of those prototypes becomes a wild success, a “Cadillac problem”, the system is already built on a durable, scalable foundation that’s ready for it. We’ve already built the garage for the Cadillac.
The “Intent”: Our Platform’s Memory
To manage these complex, long-running physical processes, we created a concept called the “Intent.”
An Intent is a persistent, “workflow state token.” It’s how our system knows what needs to happen next, and how to do it. I like to think of it as a map of the future. While a Kafka event is a record of something that happened in the past, an Intent is a durable promise of a workflow that will happen in the future.
This is our secret weapon for agility and reliability.
Imagine a customer places an order to have a card graded. On day one, they select “Ship to Home”. But two weeks later, while our experts grade the card, the customer decides to send it to the Vault instead.
In a traditional, tightly-coupled system, this would be a nightmare. You’d have to find the original order, issue a “change” command, and hope every downstream service can correctly interpret it.
CORE Process Flow: Shared Business Language
In the CORE platform, the process is simple:
- The Grading service does nothing. It has no idea the customer changed their mind, nor should it. Its job is to grade the card.
- The customer is able to simply update their Intent in CORE from SHIP_HOME to VAULT.
- Eventually, when grading is complete, CORE’s orchestration engine checks the Intent for that item. It sees the VAULT intent and automatically routes the card to the vaulting process.
This is the power of decoupling: the system completely insulates the operational workflow (grading) from the customer-facing product workflow (changing their mind). It allows us to be incredibly agile and build new product experiences on top of our physical operations, without ever having to re-architect them.
The greatest validation of this framework didn’t come from an engineer. It came from an Operations partner. During a meeting about a complex logistics problem, he leaned on his experience and asked: “This seems complicated, but can’t we just use a CORE Intent to manage the handoff”?
In that moment, we knew we had succeeded. We didn’t just build a new piece of technology, we had created a new, simple, shared language that our entire business, from engineers to operations, could use to build, innovate, and solve problems together. We had succeeded in our mission to prove that tech serves and enables the business rather than being something arcane running in the background.
The Platform Advantage: Durability, Scalability, and Visibility
This architecture gives us three massive advantages:
- It’s Durable: We never lose a transaction. Because every business event is a durable Kafka message and every future step is an “Intent,” we can survive any system failure, from a pod restart to a full third-party outage. If temporary bugs or issues result in broken transactions, we can simply replay the workflow to recover.
- It’s Scalable: This architecture is horizontally scalable by design. To handle 10x the load, we simply add more consumers.
- It’s a Smooth Experience: We “smooth out” the messy, asynchronous background processes. The customer gets an instant and clean UI. CORE orchestrates the complex, multi-day fulfillment and ensures total fidelity for accounting workflows in the background.
Ultimately, CORE is not just a set of services. It’s our business-in-a-box platform, a reusable set of capabilities that lets us build and scale new products faster, more reliably, and more durably than ever before.
What’s Next: The Future of the Collector’s Journey
The CORE architecture is just beginning its journey as the foundational engine for a new generation of collector-first products. We translate complex logistics into a seamless digital experience. This enables everything from instant liquidity for vaulted assets to smarter, automated fulfillment. As the platform evolves, our goal remains clear: we remove physical friction so you can spend less time on the process and more time enjoying the hobby.
