A small team, a hard deadline, and a willingness to delete features. What we kept, what we cut, how the storefront performed in its first month.
A direct-to-consumer brand had a launch date that could not move. Their existing Shopify theme was ten plugins deep and rendering at five seconds. We had three weeks. We chose Hydrogen on Cloudflare and a single owner for product data.
The conversation that mattered happened on day one: which features we would not ship for the launch. We cut the look book, the press grid, the wholesale form, and the bundle builder. Everything else made it because it earned the cut.
In the first month after launch, time-to-interactive dropped from five seconds to one-point-two on mid-tier mobiles, and conversion lifted by a margin you can write home about. The product data has one home now. The team adds new collections without waiting on us.
The feature ledger we cut from launch is back on the table. We will ship them, just not at the cost of the storefront the brand actually needs the day customers arrive.