The problem
After years of running e-commerce on Spree, goop's platform was beginning to age. It faced a number of technical problems, both customer-facing and operational:
- The cart and checkout experiences were slow
- Searches often returned irrelevant results
- Vendor integrations would take months to develop
- Email marketing capabilities were limited
- A complex software infrastructure was expensive to maintain
The solution
Our goal was to achieve optimal performance while simplifying a complex system to be better suited for a small, but fast-moving team. Relaunching alongside fresh designs would make for an exciting brand moment.
Shopify would replace Spree as the e-commerce backend. Vendor-owned Shopify apps would replace a dozen custom microservices.
Algolia would replace Lucidworks Fusion for search to improve relevancy and AI boosting capabilities.
Klaviyo would replace Iterable as the email service provider, selected for its superior user experience and robust features.
Shopify Managed Markets would act as the merchant of record for international orders, replacing Global-E.
WordPress would continue to act as the CMS for editorial pages, to be replaced by a headless CMS post launch.
A single Hydrogen application deployed as a Cloudflare Worker would replace six Next.js clients deployed on AWS EKS. Shopify's Oxygen would not be an option due to the routing complexity between Hydrogen and WordPress.
Designs would be delivered by an external partner 1r agency.
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| Commerce | Spree | Shopify |
| Search | Lucidworks Fusion | Algolia |
| Iterable | Klaviyo | |
| International | Global-E | Shopify Managed Markets |
| Content | WordPress | WordPress |
| Frontend | Next.js (6 frontends) | Hydrogen (1 frontend) |
| Hosting | AWS EKS | Cloudflare Workers |
My role
As Director of Engineering I was responsible for the engineering roadmap and managing goop's in-house development team. Throughout the project, I also filled the roles of product manager, architect, and lead engineer. My responsibilities included:
- Design the engineering roadmap
- Architect the new system
- Manage the project timeline
- Write tickets and organize sprints
- Develop the release plan
- Review code
- Write code
Timeline
- December 2024: Tech leadership aligns on solutions, including Shopify, Algolia, and Klaviyo. Given the complexity of keeping both commerce and content under the goop.com domain, it is determined that we will use Hydrogen in place of Liquid, and deploy to Cloudflare Workers.
- January 2025: goop's in-house development team begins setting up Shopify backend and developing Hydrogen frontend.
- February 2025: Begin setting up search with Algolia and designing the new component library with the design team.
- March 2025: Working with tech and marketing leadership, 1r agency begins design discovery.
- April 2025: Design agency is blocked by ongoing branding agency work. The first batch of designs is delayed.
- May 2025: Engineering team begins design system development after first batch of designs are delivered.
- June 2025: Final batch of designs is delivered. I determine that engineering is behind schedule. To speed up development, we hire two contract developers through 1r agency.
- July 2025: The contract developers onboard rapidly and seamlessly integrate into the team's workflow. Development is speeding up and the application is coming together.
- August 2025: Development is complete. Engineering team spends final two weeks on QA and bug fixes.
- August 2025 (Launch Day): The site enters maintenance mode at 10pm EDT. Routing is cut over from the old site to the new one. A few minor issues are encountered and quickly fixed. The site launches successfully.
The results
After successfully launching in August 2025, goop experienced one of the most successful Labor Day sales in its history. Now running on a modern e-commerce stack, the marketing team has greater control over product page content, listing page rankings and filter capabilities, search boosting, and email targeting.
Originally operating on a team of 14 engineers, reduced complexity meant the site could effectively operate on its remaining team of 4. No longer a source of frustration, goop's technology is well positioned for the future of e-commerce.