orchardclassicdecals.com.

The problem

Andy's Shopify store had run on Empire — a theme released in 2013, no major update since — for the life of the business. Layered with admin defaults, abandoned apps, and CSS that fought every customisation. The renders were heavy, the catalogue was hard to find, the brand voice was buried under generic Shopify chrome.

Andy wasn't asking for a redesign because the bones were broken. He was asking because every small change fought the platform.

The approach

Strangler-fig migration. Section by section, the old Empire theme stayed live while we built a parallel theme — ocd-prefixed files, Empire CSS conditionally excluded where the new sections rendered.

That meant zero pressure to finish-everything-or-nothing. Every section that landed shipped to the dev theme, went through Andy's walkthrough, and waited. By cutover day, the new theme had been Andy-reviewed for weeks.

Content ran concurrent with the rebuild: 10 articles drafted and voice-system-verified, 7 SEO landing pages refreshed with PAA-mapped H2 additions, 95-record vendor canonicalisation, 85 product-option UK-spelling rename. All programmatic via Admin GraphQL — no manual clicking through Shopify admin.

The cutover

Theme published. Three pages flipped to live. URL redirect created for the renamed catalogue handle. Smoke test through five customer journeys. Total customer-visible disruption: zero. Total operator time at the controls: about thirty minutes.

What it reflects

The client's craft was the spec — Andy's voice, his fifty-four model-year-specific decal sets, his reputation on eBay. The rebuild gave that craft a surface that doesn't fight it. The numbers — Lighthouse 96 on launch day, eight weeks concept to live — are second-order outcomes of getting that part right.