Pacific Trail Outfitters — E-Commerce Rebuild

The challenge

Pacific Trail Outfitters is a San Diego-based outdoor gear retailer with a loyal local following and growing online sales. Their Shopify theme was hitting its limits — slow load times on mobile, no way to build the editorial landing pages their marketing team wanted, and a rigid layout that looked generic next to competitors.

Their Lighthouse performance scores were consistently in the 30–45 range. Mobile was worse. Paid traffic was converting at roughly half the desktop rate.

What we built

We built a headless storefront using Next.js App Router connected to Shopify's Storefront API. The result is a fully custom front-end that keeps Shopify as the commerce engine while giving the marketing team full control over content and layout.

What shipped:

• Custom product pages with variant swatches, live inventory, and sticky add-to-cart
• Editorial landing page builder using Sanity CMS — no developer needed to create seasonal campaigns
• Collections with server-side filtering and instant client-side refinement
• Cart with optimistic UI updates and cross-sell recommendations
• Fully responsive, touch-optimised mobile experience

All images run through Next.js Image Optimization. Pages are statically generated where possible and revalidate on inventory changes.

How we worked

We ran an eight-week project: two weeks of design, five weeks of build, one week of QA and cut-over. The Pacific Trail marketing team contributed heavily to the Sanity schema design — they knew exactly what editorial flexibility they needed and we built around their mental model.

The cut-over used Shopify's DNS proxying so there was no gap in checkout availability during the transition.

Results

Post-launch Lighthouse scores moved to 94 Performance, 100 Accessibility. LCP dropped from 4.2 seconds to 1.4 seconds on mobile 4G.

Organic search traffic climbed 28% within 60 days, attributed to improved Core Web Vitals and the new editorial content the team could now publish without developer involvement. Mobile conversion rate improved 17%.