Northwind.

A storefront that worked against itself.

Northwind had built a loyal following over fifteen years, but the site hadn’t kept up. Pages took four-plus seconds to load, the checkout was a five-step maze, and the whole thing buckled on mobile — where most of their traffic now lived.

The team knew they were losing sales. They just couldn’t see exactly where, and every fix on the old platform created two new bugs.

Rebuild the foundation, not just the paint.

We started with a paid discovery week — mapping the real purchase funnel, instrumenting where carts died, and agreeing on the smallest rebuild that would move the numbers.

The bet: a fast, three-step checkout on a modern stack would pay for the whole project in a quarter.

Rather than a big-bang relaunch, we shipped the new checkout behind a flag first, proved the lift, then rebuilt the catalog around it.

Six weeks, shipping every Friday.

• Rebuilt the storefront on Next.js with server components for instant catalog loads.
• Replaced the five-step checkout with a three-step Stripe flow, saved-card support, and Apple/Google Pay.
• Moved content to Sanity so the team edits products and campaigns without a developer.
• Set up monitoring and Core Web Vitals budgets so performance can’t silently regress.

Every Friday the team got a live URL and a five-minute walkthrough. No surprises, no big reveal — just steady, visible progress.

Checkout stopped leaking.

Within the first month, checkout conversion was up 38% and cart abandonment had halved. The site went from a liability the team apologized for to something they sent customers to with pride.

Northwind kept Cloud129 on a light monthly retainer for iteration and seasonal campaigns — the relationship that this whole site is built to start.