Lumen Apparel replatformed to Shopify Plus in nine weeks.

Item: Effectdev Technology LLC — e-commerce
Rating: 5
Author: HEAD OF MERCHANDISING, VIA AGENCY OF RECORD

A US-based medical-apparel retailer running on a decade-old Magento 1 stack that nobody wanted to touch. We rebuilt it on Shopify Plus, restructured the swatch architecture with metaobjects, and migrated 80k customer accounts the week Shopify deprecated the legacy login.

+47%

CVR vs. legacy site

1.4s

p75 LCP mobile

$1.8M

GMV first 90 days

9 wks

discovery to live

// §01

The brief.

The client came to us through their long-time creative partner. The site was Magento 1, end-of-life since 2020, patched into Frankenstein territory by three previous agencies. Every product had between 8 and 40 color and material variants, hand-coded into the theme as static swatches. Adding a new SKU took a developer half a day.

They needed three things: a platform that wouldn't die on them again, a swatch system that merchandisers could actually use, and a customer account migration that didn't break the loyalty data their repeat buyers depended on. Shopify's new customer account deprecation was the wrench in the timeline.

$ cat ./constraints.txt

· Swatch system must support 40-variant products without developer involvement

· Mobile p75 LCP of 3.8s → under 1.8s

· Migrate 80k customer accounts before legacy auth deprecation

· Zero loss of repeat-purchase history or loyalty balances

· Creative partner owns design; we own architecture, no overlap

// §02

The approach.

Four phases. Nine weeks. Two senior devs, one BA running client comms, design handled in parallel by the creative partner.

Audit

Two weeks of requirements gap analysis. We mapped every Magento extension, every theme override, every loyalty integration. Output: a 52-page functional tech spec and a swatch architecture decision document.

Architect

Shopify Plus with swatch logic built on metaobjects, not metafields. One metaobject per color family, referenced across product variants. Merchandisers add a new colorway in under two minutes.

Build

Six-week sprint. Two devs full-time, design handled in parallel, weekly client demos. Customer account migration scripted against the new Shopify account API, dry-run twice before go-live.

Cutover

Saturday 10pm ET. DNS swap, Shopify Plus checkout live, legacy Magento archived read-only. Account migration ran overnight. Live by Sunday noon. Zero loyalty data loss.

// §03