Case study · Luxury Retail
Forty Five Ten.
A 14-week Hydrogen + Plus replatform for one of the country's most curated luxury department stores — built for the way collectors actually shop online.
Forty Five Ten is one of the country's most quietly powerful luxury retailers — a 12-year-old institution that buys from Margiela, The Row, Khaite, and a hundred under-the-radar designers most people will never hear of. Their physical stores are a destination. Their digital presence had never quite caught up.
They hired us with a brief that was, on the surface, simple: "Make the website feel like the store." Underneath: a 3-year-old headless build that couldn't keep up with their merchandising team, a checkout dragging international conversion, and a Sanity instance with seven years of editorial content nobody could find.
We were the third agency they'd brought in. The clock was ticking — they had a Spring '25 buyer's preview already on the books.
We started by getting opinionated. The old build was trying to be everything — a Shopify front-end, a CMS, a CDN edge layer, a personalization engine. It was none of those things particularly well. Our first move was to collapse the stack: Hydrogen + Oxygen for the storefront, Sanity for editorial, Klaviyo for lifecycle. Three vendors. Clear contracts.
From there, four parallel workstreams: a new design system in Figma matched to the print buyer's catalog, a headless checkout rebuild for international tax and duties via Avalara, a full content migration off legacy WordPress, and a performance overhaul that took the homepage from a 4.2s LCP to 1.1s.
Every Friday: a live demo with the founder, the merchandising lead, and the CTO. Every Monday: a punch-list, prioritized in Linear. No status decks. No PMs in the loop "synthesizing." Just engineers shipping.
The results.
We launched on March 11, 2025. Zero downtime, one Slack channel still open from build week, and the founder watching from Milan. The numbers, 90 days in:
"Third agency in three years. The first one that actually shipped the thing they promised — on schedule, on budget, no surprises. Our merchandising team has its life back."
We've replatformed eight luxury retailers in the last three years — including three off WordPress, two off BigCommerce, and one off an in-house Symfony build that nobody at the client had touched in five years.