Every December, our family ran gift lists the same way: screenshots, a group chat, someone's Notes app, and mostly, shared Amazon lists. Amazon lists kept everyone limited to what they could find on Amazon, so the small-shop gift or the experience never made it onto a list. Two people bought the same thing. Someone else bought nothing because they couldn't find the list. And the kids could see half of it.

In ops terms, there was no single source of truth, no ownership, and the customer could see the backlog.

The first version

So I built our family a private page. Everyone had a list, wishes could link to any store, and anyone could call dibs on a gift so nobody doubled up. The one rule that mattered most: you can never see who called dibs on your own list. No spoilers, ever.

It worked. People actually used it, which is the only test that counts. Then friends started asking if they could have one.

Turning it into a product

Going from "my family's page" to "something any family can buy" meant answering the boring questions properly:

• Setup without me. Checkout creates a family's department automatically and emails them their link.
• No accounts, no app. Each family gets one private link. Each person taps their name and picks a short code, and their phone remembers them.
• Not just Christmas. Birthdays, Hanukkah, Valentine's Day, Mother's and Father's Day (with the right dates for families in the US and Australia), anniversaries, and custom dates.
• Make it yours. Themes that follow the next occasion, Secret Santa draws, and guest links for grandparents who just want to shop.
• Gifting, start to finish. Price ranges so givers can shop by budget, group gifts with a private chat for splitting the big stuff, and a thank-you checklist once the occasion has passed.
• Tools for the organizer. A visit counter, a log of who's stopped by (by name for anyone who's entered their code), and parent-run lists for babies and young kids.
• The unglamorous parts. "Lost my link" and "forgot your code" flows, what happens when a year lapses, and a private usage dashboard so I can see what families actually use before deciding what to build next.

My family found the bugs

The real test was real use: my own family on our own kids' lists, and friends' families running their own departments. A group gift on the baby's list put the baby in the chat instead of me, because opening his list had made my phone think it was him. Invites went unseen. There was no obvious way back from your own list to everyone else's. After moving our family to the new version, everyone had to sign back in.

Each one became a decision: little kids' lists never claim a phone, invites and chat show up live on the family page, a clear back button, and a "which one are you?" picker with a personal code. Then I asked "what else could go wrong?" and found the next round: a gift deleted after someone bought it, a lost phone holding dibs, and names anyone could grab before a code was set.

Building it with AI

I built this with Claude writing the code. My job was the product manager's: describe the problem, ask for mockups before building, push back when an answer didn't hold up, and review every change before it went live. That was 51 changes, and nothing shipped without me.

Why a department store

I wanted it to feel warm, not like software. So everything has a department store name: your family's page is the department, the admin side is the workshop, your list is my list, and opened gifts go to the gifted shelf.

The full case study

The timeline, every bug and the decision it led to, the key product decisions, screenshots, and how I measure usage are all in the wishlist department case study.

The wishlist department is $19 a year per family, and the first 25 founding families get it for $15 a year for as long as they stay. Take a look.