Case Studies · E-commerce · 16 weeks

DTC Brand Replatforms to Headless Commerce, Lifts Conversion 38%

How a nine-figure DTC brand replatformed from legacy Shopify theme to headless Next.js + Shopify Plus, lifting mobile conversion 38% and adding $14M+ in annual revenue.

Challenge

A nine-figure DTC brand was losing 18% of mobile conversions to slow page load and unpredictable layout shifts. Their legacy Shopify theme had grown to 4MB JavaScript over five years of plugins. Mobile Lighthouse perf scores hovered around 38; Core Web Vitals failed on every key page template.

Approach

Empire325 architected a headless commerce stack: Next.js storefront on Vercel, Shopify Plus as commerce backend, Sanity CMS for content, Algolia for search. Hero images converted to AVIF + responsive sizes, framer-motion replaced with CSS animations on critical paths, third-party scripts deferred to lazyOnload, and edge caching configured for static product pages. Closed-loop revenue attribution wired to GA4 server-side.

Outcome

Mobile Lighthouse perf scores moved from 38 to 94 across all key templates. LCP dropped from 5.8s to 1.6s. Mobile conversion rate increased 38%, with the largest gains on collection pages where layout stability previously caused mistaps. Annual revenue impact: $14.2M incremental.