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Shelfery Venture Brief

This brief describes Shelfery as it is currently understood. It is deliberately structured to separate what is actually known from what is merely assumed or still open, so that no reader — human or AI — mistakes an early idea for a decided plan.

Known Facts

  • Shelfery is a venture of Devonshire Digital LLC, a private/proprietary parent company.
  • Shelfery is a customer-facing product brand oriented around home food-storage and pantry management — helping households understand, organize, and use the food they have.
  • Shelfery is intended to be developed as an independently identifiable brand. It is not presented as a product of any umbrella brand (there is no "DDLabs" or equivalent umbrella brand at Devonshire Digital).
  • An implementation of the product exists and is in production (observed evidence, 2026-07-11): a mobile-first web app (PWA) in the separate pantryplus repository (GitHub brokenlyre/pantryplus), deployed on Vercel, currently under the working name PantryPlus. Its own decision log records a product-owner decision to rename it to Shelfery, with the shelfery.app domain acquired; the rename has not yet been executed. See ADR-0010 (approved 2026-07-11) and docs/architecture/implementation-alignment.md.
  • Shipped capabilities (observed from the implementation repository's documentation, not independently re-verified): multi-user households with roles and invites, barcode/AI scan-first item entry, storage locations and areas, multi-lot expiration tracking, shopping list with put-away flow, used-vs-tossed capture, and AI usage caps.
  • No formal product specification exists yet in this repository (see product/README.md); the implementation preceded this repository's specification gates. Back-filling specifications from observed product behavior is a pending human decision.
  • A provisional working brand direction exists (warm, earthy, household-oriented) — see docs/strategy/brand-and-positioning.md — and is implemented in the production app, but it has not been formally approved as a brand system.

Working Assumptions

These are directional hypotheses the venture is currently working from. They are not commitments and may change as the venture is validated.

  • The core user unit is a household. The implementation has shipped multi-user households (admin/member roles, invites), so this is now an implemented design choice — though it remains unvalidated with a broad user base beyond the founding household.
  • Users likely want to reduce food waste and feel more in control of what they already own, rather than primarily wanting a shopping or recipe tool. This has not been validated with real users. (The implementation's own vision document frames this as "Record → Advise → Reward" — also a hypothesis.)
  • A concrete data model exists in the implementation (households, locations, storage areas, products, inventory items/lots, shopping list items — see docs/domain/domain-concepts.md for the conceptual view and the implementation repository for the actual schema). Whether this model is the right long-term model has not been formally reviewed here.
  • A warm, reassuring, non-clinical tone is assumed to fit this product domain better than a generic productivity/SaaS aesthetic. This is implemented in the production app but remains a brand hypothesis, not a validated positioning claim.

Open Questions

See docs/strategy/assumptions-and-open-questions.md for the full, maintained register — several formerly open questions (platform, barcode scanning, AI features, household sharing, repository boundary) are now answered de facto by the implementation and are annotated there accordingly. Key questions that remain genuinely open:

  • What the pricing model will be. (The implementation repository contains an unapproved freemium-subscription strategy and a shipped plan entitlements seam, but no pricing decision has been ratified.)
  • Where authoritative food-safety and shelf-life data would come from (see docs/domain/trust-safety-and-food-claims.md) — this becomes pressing before the implementation ships expiry alerts, default expiry windows, or AI meal suggestions.
  • What level of visible endorsement, if any, Devonshire Digital LLC will have on Shelfery-facing surfaces.
  • Whether/when the formal brand approval step runs, given the implemented provisional direction and the decided-but-unexecuted rename.
  • How material decisions made in the implementation repository get mirrored into this repository's governance going forward (see docs/architecture/implementation-alignment.md).

ADR-0010 (repository boundary) and ADR-0012 (product name) are now approved. Other items answered de facto by the implementation should still be treated as awaiting ratification here; items listed as open above should not be treated as decided by anyone drafting product, marketing, or engineering content.

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