Shipped a custom Shopify storefront in 6 weeks, not 6 months

The brief

Vellum Press, an independent literary publisher with a strong editorial brand, was running on a six-year-old Shopify theme that loaded in 3.8 seconds on mobile and looked like every other Shopify site from 2020. They wanted a custom storefront that matched the typographic standard of the books they publish — without a six-month rebuild that would freeze new releases.

What we did

Discovery + scope (week 1). We mapped 14 distinct customer paths (new release pre-orders, backlist browse, gift sets, institutional sales) and locked a scope that said yes to seven of them and explicitly punted the other seven to phase two.

Design system (week 2). We built the visual language around an editorial display serif (Reckless), warm paper tones, and generous gutters. Every component was designed light + dark in parallel, and the whole system was published to a single Figma library that's still the source of truth.

Build (weeks 3–5). Headless Shopify on a custom Next.js storefront. Server-side rendering for SEO, edge caching for speed, native Shopify checkout to avoid PCI complexity.

QA + launch (week 6). Cross-browser, cross-device, accessibility, security review. Soft launch with 5% of traffic split to the new site for 48 hours before flipping 100%.

What we shipped

• Custom headless Shopify storefront (Next.js + Hydrogen)
• Editorial-first design system, published in Figma
• 24-page content migration from old CMS
• SEO continuity plan with 301 redirects for every legacy URL

The numbers

• LCP: 3.8s → 1.1s
• CLS: 0.18 → 0.02
• Organic search traffic: +207% in the quarter following launch
• Mobile conversion: +44% in the first 30 days

What's next

Phase two — institutional sales portal with quote-based ordering — is scheduled for late Q3.