Context
Atlas needed a storefront that could keep pace with editorial drops and peak traffic without sacrificing clarity at checkout. We rebuilt the experience around a strict performance budget, disciplined merchandising components, and instrumentation that ties UX changes to revenue.
Engagement
- Timeline
- Discovery 3 weeks · build 12 weeks · hardening & launch 4 weeks
- Team shape
- Embedded pod with Atlas VP Engineering + internal design lead; weekly governance with finance for tax edge cases.
- Engineering complexity
- Multi-region tax, three payment processors, and campaign-specific preview URLs — coordinated load tests before each major drop.
Before / after
Before
Legacy Liquid theme with rising CLS on PDP and checkout timeouts above ~1.2k concurrent carts.
After
Hydrogen storefront on Oxygen with edge-cached PDPs, contract-tested checkout, and merchandising components editors can compose safely.
Outcomes
- Largest drop weekend
- Sub-second LCP on PDP across 14 locales
- Checkout completion
- +18% vs. prior theme (same traffic mix)
- Ops load
- Merchandising updates ship without developer handoffs
Capabilities
- Hydrogen storefront
- Edge caching
- Design system
- A/B-ready modules
Stack
Next.js · Shopify Hydrogen · Edge