Sage & Madison Shopify Rebuild

A Shopify rebuild for an upscale lifestyle gift boutique in Sag Harbor, housed in a restored 1797 property on the National Registry of Historic Places.

The store was running the deprecated Debut theme, and almost nothing visible on the site actually lived in the theme — the homepage was built in PageFly, with GemPages, two Globo apps, and qikify handling the rest. That's the trap: you can't improve a theme that isn't rendering your site. The real job was reverse-engineering app-rendered HTML back into native Liquid sections on the premium Online Store 2.0 theme the client had already bought.

I ported the full homepage (9 sections) and 10 content pages — editorial, history timeline, biography, press, gift baskets, events, and more — matching each to its original template suffix so the store's existing page bindings kept working with no admin changes at all. The press page in particular got rebuilt natively: six publication mastheads, each over a horizontal-scrolling row of clipping cards.

Along the way I found ~$690/yr in removable recurring app cost — the paid filter app they were running can be replaced by Shopify's free native Search & Discovery — and documented the migration against the renewal date so they can act on it on schedule.

The entire rebuild ran on an unpublished theme via the Shopify CLI, so the revenue-generating live store was never touched. Zero downtime, and content that's now editable by the client in the theme editor instead of locked inside third-party page builders.