i built my friend a product for his birthday

i met lars at a wedding in mexico. this year i got invited to his 58th birthday, and the man needs NOTHING. i stood in the vans store in berlin (he loves vans) staring at shelves, waiting for them to tell me what to buy.

they did not. so instead of buying him vans, i built him a product: tinder, but every card is lars wearing something from the vans catalog.

he swipes right on any of the 987 vans products in there, an AI puts it on his body, and if he actually likes it the card links straight to the product page. there is a closet with every look he has generated, and a "glück" tab that rolls him a random surprise outfit like a slot machine.

things that went wrong, in order:

vans.com really did not want to give me its catalog. every scrape ended in a "prove you are human" wall, until we switched to camoufox, a stealth firefox that is patched at the C++ level to not look like automation. suddenly nobody asked if i was human anymore. great. concerning, but great.

there was no usable full-body photo of lars. so chatgpt generated one from a photo of his face: lars, in a suit, in a studio that does not exist. that suit turned out to be the best accident of the project, because the try-on model swaps pieces out of it one at a time. try on a backpack and he is a man in a full suit wearing a rucksack. it is weirdly dignified.

the try-on itself is black forest labs' virtual try-on api. about 7 cents per generation, until i learned they bill per megapixel and downsampled everything to 5. lars gets exactly 500 generations, because the whole thing runs on leftover credits on a friend's api key. constraints are the gift wrap.

my favorite part is the loading state. seedance 2.0 turned a comic version of lars into a tiny looping video, and it plays for at least five seconds even when the generation is already done. nobody needed that. i needed that.

the whole UI is in german, because lars does not speak english and the target audience of this product is exactly one man.

it is live on cloudflare, built in a single claude code session, and i never even ran git init. please do not tell anyone i said that.

what am i learning from this? the gap between "i have no idea what to get him" and "i shipped him a product" is now one long evening. if you are friends with me, you might just get a product as a gift.