As a woodworker myself, I am deeply involved in the woodworking community. I have a strong interest in hand tools, particularly hand planes, chisels and saws, and in how they can be used to create strong, beautiful joints in furniture.

Before World War II, the highest quality hand tools were made in the United States by Stanley (now Stanley Black & Decker). Those tools were so well regarded that collectors now search the globe for old Stanley hand planes, and some of the rarer ones are worth a fortune. After the war, though, the quality of Stanley's tools dropped off significantly, and there was no leading manufacturer of high quality hand tools until the 1980s, when a man named Thomas Lie-Nielsen began producing them.

Today, Lie-Nielsen is widely considered the best manufacturer of North American-style hand tools in the world, and their beautiful, perfectly made tools are sought after by woodworkers across the globe.

Buying tools from Lie-Nielsen can be difficult. The company, located in Maine, is small, somewhat intentionally so, and large portions of its inventory are made in small batches that sell out within hours of release. The company also occasionally produces small batches of very rare, custom tools that it never intends to make again, often out of less common materials such as white bronze, with handles or knobs made of exotic woods.

That scarcity is what motivated this application: it gives users immediate notifications when new products are added, inventory changes or prices are updated.

Like this website, the application does not rely on a third-party component library. Instead, it uses an internal component library built with SASS and TailwindCSS, along with tooling libraries such as Floating UI and .