A heritage retailer gets a storefront as fast as its taste.
Headless replatform with an 0.8-second storefront — mobile conversion up 64%, Black Friday at 11,400 rps without a blink.
Client
Lumen & Oak
Timeline
5 months
Craft
Design Engineering
Product Engineering
What needed to change
Lumen & Oak sells considered homeware to people who notice details — on a storefront that took 4.1 seconds to paint and made them wait through five checkout steps. Mobile conversion sat at 0.9%. Every campaign landing page needed an engineering ticket and a two-week lead.
The team knew exactly what they wanted to say; the platform just couldn't say it quickly. Peak season was a yearly act of prayer.
What we made together
MOVE 01
The edge storefront
A headless storefront rendered at the edge, with a strict performance budget in CI — any pull request that pushed LCP past one second failed the build. The budget held.
MOVE 02
Checkout in one breath
Five steps became one considered page — address intelligence, saved wallets and payment in a single motion. Cart abandonment fell by a third.
MOVE 03
The merchandising desk
A visual composer over structured content lets the merch team assemble campaign pages in an afternoon — on-brand by construction, no ticket required.
MOVE 04
A design system with taste
Typography, spacing and motion codified into components that make the cheap thing and the beautiful thing the same thing.
What moved in daylight
GOLDEN HOUR launched in October; Black Friday arrived five weeks later at 11,400 requests per second and the storefront never blinked. Mobile conversion rose 64% in the first quarter. The CFO's note to our invoice said simply: 'It paid for itself before this cleared.'
0.8 s
largest contentful paint
from 4.1 s
+64%
mobile conversion
first quarter after launch
1 page
checkout
from 5 steps
11,400 rps
Black Friday peak
zero downtime
“It paid for itself before the invoice cleared. I have never written that sentence about software.”
J. WhitfieldCFO, Lumen & Oak
NEXT WORK
Atlas Grid · sunward
