Case Studies

Four Sparrows: How One Brand Became a Website, a Game, and a Pinterest Machine

Direct Answer

Four Sparrows Social Club is an upscale women's mahjong parlor and social club opening at Mizner Park in Boca Raton, Florida. For this one client, I delivered four connected systems from a single brand foundation: the brand identity, the website direction through real feedback rounds and a documented WordPress handoff, a playable American-style mahjong web game generated from the brand brief, and an autonomous Pinterest pipeline that posts one branded pin every day at zero running cost.

This is the clearest picture of what a design-plus-automation studio actually sells. Not four separate vendor engagements that vaguely match. One brand world, read by every system that came after it.

Published with permission. The client approved this case study. Growth metrics below are monthly views (reach), date-stamped July 2026, with public receipts linked in the proof section.

The Client

The brief was specific about the world: a private club on a Palm Beach veranda, Old Florida hospitality, soft chinoiserie, mature and refined but never precious. Muted sage, dusty coral, ivory, warm paper, brushed gold. Mahjong itself carries the name: "mahjong" translates to sparrow, and a winning American hand is four sets. Four Sparrows.

Like most new businesses, the club needed everything at once: identity, web presence, launch marketing, and a way to keep the project itself organized. The engagement was structured so each deliverable fed the next instead of starting from zero every time.

1. The Brand Foundation

Everything started with the identity: a logo suite (four sparrows in a quatrefoil, green linework, coral serif type) delivered in RGB and CMYK across AI, EPS, PDF, SVG, and PNG, with black and white variants, a color guide, and a written brand brief. That brief is the most reused file in the whole project. The website concepts read from it. The game's tile faces read from it. The Pinterest pins read from it.

This is the practical argument for doing brand first: it is not decoration, it is the specification every later system compiles against.

2. The Website, Through Real Feedback

The web side went through honest client iterations: three concept directions, a live coming-soon signup page at foursparrowsmahj.com, and a v4 handoff built for the client's own WordPress, WooCommerce, and Elementor Pro stack. The handoff document specifies standalone image assets with 1x and 2x retina versions, lowercase hyphenated filenames with dimensions, minimum 16px body text, and WCAG 2.1 AA contrast throughout.

One detail worth noticing: when the client decided a deliverable did not fit her site, it was removed and the exclusion was written into the handoff so it could never quietly return. Client feedback is not just implemented, it is preserved as project memory.

3. The Mahjong Game

The game is the deliverable people do not expect from a branding engagement. Built in Claude Code from four inputs (the brand brief, the final logo files, one background image, one layout mockup), it is a full American-style mahjong web app: 152 tiles, seeded deals, the complete Charleston, claims, exposures, jokers, and scoring, all in a pure TypeScript rules engine.

The club got its own 24-hand house card in 7 categories, stored as editable data so a new season card is a JSON edit rather than a rebuild (and no NMJL yearly card is ever copied). Three AI opponent personas play against you, and the same evaluation engine powers coaching hints for new players. The tile faces are hand-drawn SVGs in the brand palette; the 1-Bam is a sparrow. It installs as a PWA and plays fully offline. You can play it in your browser right now.

4. The Pinterest Machine

Launch marketing needed cadence, not heroics. The pipeline is deliberately boring: Cloudinary hosts 134 branded pins, a GitHub Actions cron fires once a day, and the Buffer API publishes the next pin to Pinterest. A committed cursor file tracks which pin is next. Every layer runs on a free tier, so the whole system costs nothing per month and nobody schedules anything by hand.

Secrets live only in local environment files and GitHub Actions secrets, never in code. The one-time setup (build the post data, upload the images, find the channel IDs, dry-run the first pin) took an afternoon. It has been posting daily ever since.

5. The Project Board

The delivery process itself became a system: a password-gated Next.js and Supabase kanban board shared between client and designer, with to-do, in-progress, and done columns, drag priority, notes, screenshots, comments, and a launch countdown. No status-update emails, no "where are we on this?" calls. The board is the status.

Results So Far

MetricValueNote
Deliverable systems4 (+ project board)Brand, website direction, game, Pinterest pipeline
Pins publishing autonomously134One per day via GitHub Actions + Buffer
Pinterest monthly views7.1KAbout 4 weeks after launch, as of July 2026. Reach, not sales.
Automation running cost$0/monthCloudinary, GitHub Actions, and Buffer free tiers
Club card hands24Original hands in 7 categories, stored as data

The receipts are public: growth post one and growth post two on X, and the Pinterest account itself.

What This Means If You Are Hiring

Three things transfer from this project to almost any client engagement:

Brand first is cheaper, not slower. The written brief did the work of a hundred alignment calls. Every system that followed compiled against it, which is why a game, a website, and a marketing pipeline made months apart still look like one thing.

Automation should be boring. The Pinterest pipeline has no dashboard, no subscription, and no daily human input. It does one thing on a schedule with free infrastructure. That is what "it just runs" actually looks like.

Client feedback is data to preserve. Decisions, including what the client rejected, are written into handoff documents. That is how a project survives handoffs, breaks, and new collaborators without re-litigating old choices.

Everything claimed above is checkable: the full system page, the playable game, the client website, and the Pinterest account posting daily.

If your business needs this kind of connected delivery, start with the Pinterest Growth Automation service (productized directly from this pipeline), the AI-Powered Web Design service, or book a free consultation.

Common questions

What did the Four Sparrows engagement include?
A complete brand identity (logo suite, color guide, written brand brief), website concepts plus a live coming-soon page and a documented WordPress handoff, a playable American-style mahjong web game built from the brand brief, an autonomous daily Pinterest pipeline of 134 branded pins, and a shared client project board.
What results did the Pinterest automation produce?
As of July 2026, about 4 weeks after launch, the Four Sparrows Pinterest account reached 7.1K monthly views. Those are reach numbers, not sales, and they are date-stamped because they change. The pipeline posts one pin per day with zero running cost and zero manual scheduling.
How was the mahjong game built?
In Claude Code, from four inputs: the written brand brief, the final logo files, one background image, and one layout mockup. The result is an installable web app with a pure TypeScript rules engine, 152 tiles, the full Charleston, a custom 24-hand club card stored as data, three AI opponent personas, coaching hints, and offline play.
Does JQ AI SYSTEMS publish client work without permission?
No. This case study is published with the client's permission, and client feedback decisions, including removed deliverables, are respected in what is shown. Private files, credentials, and internal client material stay private.
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