Global Jute Trading
Editorial export site for Global Jute Trading Ltd — a Dhaka-based sourcing & exporting house with 26 years as a company and 35 years of jute trading under its principals. Built to support their push into deeper international markets, with a particular focus on Canada.
The problem
Bangladesh jute is one of the most specification-sensitive commodities in global trade — GSM ladders, hessian vs sacking vs felt, treatment, certification, packaging, lamination. A serious importer in Canada or Switzerland can't evaluate a supplier from a brochure of stock photos and a phone number.
Global Jute Trading needed an editorial-grade catalogue that read like a specification sheet, not marketing — one a procurement lead could send up the chain at a mill, cooperative, or geotextile contractor.
What I built
- Specification-first product catalogue. MDX-authored product pages with full GSM ladders, certifications, mill provenance, and per-category process notes — every claim sourceable.
- Markets directory. A per-country / per-vertical map of where the company ships and to whom — Africa, the Americas (with Canada front-and-centre), Europe, Asia — built from a topojson world atlas and editable content data.
- Process page. The full sample-first workflow: bale sample → swatch approval → grade certificate → phytosanitary → container booking. Buyers can read the answer before asking.
- AVIF + WebP responsive image pipeline. Sharp transcodes 200+ source photos into 480/768/1200/1920 widths in two modern formats — the first-load weight on a mid-tier connection is in single-digit MB.
- TanStack Start on Cloudflare Workers. SSR-rendered at the edge with file-based routing and JSON-LD baked in for every product and market — built to be readable by importers and indexed by everyone.
What I learned
A 25-year-old trading house has more institutional knowledge than any tech-first brand I've worked with. My job was to translate that into a surface — not to invent positioning, but to organise it: principles, mill specialisations, sample workflow, documentation guarantees.
International expansion isn't a homepage problem; it's a specification problem. The pages that did the most work were the GSM ladder, the markets index, and the process page — the ones that let a procurement lead self-qualify before sending an email.
Technical Highlights
- TanStack Start (file-based routing + SSR) on Cloudflare Workers — global edge delivery.
- MDX content pipeline with remark-frontmatter for editorial product pages.
- Sharp-driven AVIF + WebP responsive image pipeline across 200+ source photos.
- d3-geo + topojson world atlas for the live international markets map.
- Tailwind CSS v4 with a custom forest-deep / paper palette tuned for editorial weight.
Architecture Decisions
MDX over a headless CMS
A 25-year trading house edits its catalogue in months, not minutes. Authoring in MDX keeps every spec change inside Git, reviewable, and free of CMS lock-in.
Edge SSR on Cloudflare Workers
Buyers land from Africa, the Americas, Europe and Asia. Static SSR at the edge gives every region the same first-paint, with zero origin server to babysit.
Specification-first IA, not marketing-first
The visitors who matter (procurement, mills, contractors) want GSM and certification before brand story. Information architecture inverts the typical homepage hierarchy on purpose.
Business Impact
- Supports a deliberate push into deeper international markets — Canada especially — with a surface importers can self-qualify on.
- Reduced the buyer onboarding loop: spec, process, and markets are documented enough to short-circuit early discovery calls.
- Established a modern editorial brand for a 25-year-old trading house without abandoning the trust signals (founding year, address, principals) that anchor B2B credibility.
