D2C apparel storefront, rebuilt in 21 days

The problem

The brand was running on a Shopify theme with eight paid apps duct-taped together. Product pages loaded slowly on the mid-range Android phones most of their customers used. Every copy change required a developer-on-retainer, and seasonal drops were scheduled around that person's availability. The founder wanted a storefront the team could update without filing a ticket.

Constraints

• Couldn't pause sales — the rebuild had to run in parallel with a live store doing daily orders.
• Catalog of 240 SKUs with variant-level inventory tied to a 3PL the team refused to migrate.
• Marketing calendar had a drop locked in for day 24 — the new storefront had to be live, indexed, and tested by then.

Approach

1. Week 1: audited the existing theme, mapped every app dependency to a native feature or a single API call, and locked the visual system before writing product code.
2. Week 2: built the storefront on Next.js with the existing Shopify backend as the commerce engine — kept inventory, checkout, and 3PL untouched.
3. Week 2-3: rebuilt product detail, collection, and cart pages with image-first layouts, replaced four review/upsell apps with native components, and migrated SEO redirects 1:1.
4. Day 19-21: dark-launched on a staging domain, ran checkout against real orders for 48 hours, then cut DNS with the drop campaign already queued.

Artifacts handed over

• A Next.js storefront the in-house marketing lead edits directly through a typed content layer.
• A redirect map and Search Console submission that preserved every ranking URL from the old theme.
• A drop playbook — the exact sequence to launch a new collection without a developer in the loop.

Outcome

The drop on day 24 went out without a single developer ticket. The marketing lead now publishes product pages, lookbooks, and landing pages the same afternoon she briefs them. The four apps they paid monthly for are gone, replaced by code the team owns. Page weight on product pages dropped by more than half, which mattered most on the older Android handsets their customers actually shop on. The founder stopped scheduling launches around freelancer calendars.

Tech

• Next.js
• TypeScript
• Shopify Storefront API
• Tailwind CSS
• Vercel
• Sanity