Saunature

Saunature brings sauna discovery and business management together for a Japan-focused platform.

The work combined product-facing discovery with the systems needed to manage facilities, accommodations, access patterns, and location-aware search.

The product foundation

The platform needed a reliable model for sauna facilities and accommodation data. I designed the APIs and data flows that support both public discovery and private business-management use cases.

That meant keeping the platform useful for people exploring new places while giving the underlying product enough structure to grow with the businesses operating them.

Search shaped by place

Location is central to how people discover a sauna. The platform used geospatial search with regional filtering so people could explore facilities in the context of where they are and where they want to go.

Meilisearch supported the discovery experience, while Mapbox provided the mapping layer for a more visual relationship between place, facility, and accommodation.

Designed for more than one audience

Saunature required public and private data-access patterns in the same product. Public-facing discovery and business-management capabilities could share a foundation without exposing the same information or behavior to every user.

That separation became part of the API design, the data model, and the way the platform could evolve without treating discovery and operations as unrelated products.

Built to ship

Alongside application development, I supported deployment and infrastructure workflows using Docker. The goal was a platform foundation that could move from feature work to a dependable deployment process without losing clarity along the way.

A product system with room to grow

Saunature was a systems problem expressed through a discovery experience: model the right information, make it searchable by place, separate public and private access, and keep the deployment path understandable.

The result is a foundation for a richer sauna ecosystem—one that connects the people looking for their next experience with the businesses that make those experiences possible.