Where'bouts - Location Scouting

Overview

Where'bouts is a New York-based location scouting agency representing decades of work in commercial and print advertising. They collaborate with major names across tech, fashion, and entertainment, and needed a digital platform that could serve their full operation — from a public-facing brand site to a private scouting platform handling enormous volumes of imagery.

Built end-to-end as the sole developer, as part of Made by Sea.

The Problem

Their archive had outgrown spreadsheets and shared folders: 20,000+ location records and 2M+ images. Scouts couldn't find what they needed quickly, and clients had no clean way to browse and shortlist selections.

What I Built

A platform with three connected surfaces:

• Public brand site — introducing the agency with editorial weight and clarity.
• Scout workspace — fast multi-faceted search across the location archive, plus tooling to upload, tag, and organize.
• Client portal — accounts where clients browse, bookmark, and shortlist locations for their projects.

The backend is DatoCMS, extended with a custom plugin I built to handle the bulk upload, tagging, and image workflows that the default editor couldn't.

Key Technical Decisions

• Next.js + DatoCMS for server-rendered pages with a strong, queryable content model.
• Custom DatoCMS plugin to handle bulk operations and relationships the default UI couldn't address.
• Multi-faceted search designed for scout workflows, where filters compound across thousands of records.
• Image delivery pipeline tuned to render hundreds of thumbnails per page without hurting performance.

Stack

Next.js, React, TypeScript, DatoCMS, Figma. Built mostly with Cursor.

Outcome

The platform is in active use by Where'bouts scouts and their clients. The custom CMS workflows let the team manage the archive without engineering involvement. Two years on, the architectural choices have held up — the same stack would still be my first instinct for this kind of project today.