A beloved bakery, finally with the 21st-century storefront it deserved

How it started

Kaitlin came to us with what sounded, on the surface, like a tidy little ask: update the website, make it friendlier, give the pages a fresh feed. The kind of project a lot of small business owners reach out about - "can we just make it a bit better?"

Then we looked at the backend. The store was running on Shopify Online Store 1.0 - a version of the platform that Shopify had effectively retired years ago. Almost every modern Shopify feature, from sections-everywhere to the new theme architecture to the latest checkout customization, was inaccessible. Trying to make meaningful changes on top of 1.0 was like trying to renovate a kitchen while the plumbing was still routed through a different building.

There were other quiet problems too. There was no real wholesale process despite a clear demand for it. Customers struggled to find products. Custom orders - which any bakery worth its butter handles regularly - involved an awkward email exchange instead of a clean form. And the storefront just didn't reflect the quality of what Harvard Sweet Boutique actually puts on a plate.

The small fix wasn't going to cut it. We told Kaitlin that honestly, and she trusted us to do the bigger version.

What we set out to do

We treated this as a foundational rebuild:

1. Migrate from Online Store 1.0 to 2.0, so every future change would be possible instead of impossible.
2. Redesign the storefront to actually represent the brand and make products easy to find and order.
3. Add the operational layers the business had been missing: pickup and delivery scheduling, wholesale, custom-order workflows.
4. Set up the ongoing relationship so the bakery would have a partner for the long haul, not just a one-time vendor.

The migration: from 1.0 to 2.0, carefully

Migrating a live e-commerce store between major Shopify versions is the kind of work that looks invisible when it goes right and catastrophic when it goes wrong. SEO rankings can disappear overnight. URLs break. Inventory gets misaligned. Customer accounts get orphaned.

We did the migration with the discipline it deserves. Full product and content audit before the move. Redirect mapping so every existing URL pointed somewhere meaningful. SEO preservation, so the search rankings the bakery had earned over years didn't reset to zero. Inventory and customer data reconciled. The 2.0 storefront staged on a development theme, reviewed, then promoted with minimal downtime.

When the new store went live, the customers didn't notice they'd moved. That's the goal. The behind-the-scenes change unlocked everything we built next.

The redesign: built around how customers actually shop a bakery

A bakery is a particular kind of retail. People don't browse aimlessly. They come knowing they want a birthday cake, or pastries for a Sunday brunch, or a gift box for a coworker who just got engaged. The job of the storefront is to get them to the right product in two or three clicks, with enough confidence that they actually order.

We restructured the navigation around occasions and product categories the way customers actually think. Each product page got real photography, clear ingredient and allergen information, gift options, and the small details that make an online order feel as personal as walking into the shop.

We added a wishlist for customers planning ahead, a live chat for the questions that always come up around custom orders, automated reviews that build trust passively, an Instagram feed that connects the storefront to the bakery's actual day-to-day, and search-and-discovery improvements so finding the right product is effortless.

Pickup, delivery, and the operational backbone

Harvard Sweet Boutique handles local pickup, delivery, and shipping - and each one has its own logistics. We integrated Zapiet directly into the storefront so customers can choose pickup or delivery at checkout, schedule a specific date and time, and see real-time availability based on the bakery's actual capacity.

This wasn't a small add-on. Pickup-and-delivery scheduling is the kind of feature that, done badly, generates more support tickets than it saves. Done well, it removes friction for customers and operations alike. We tuned it to the bakery's specific workflow so the team isn't constantly fielding "when can I pick this up?" emails.

We also built out the wholesale process - a self-serve flow that lets B2B customers register, get approved, and order from a separate catalog at their negotiated pricing.

The technical decisions

A short list of the choices that shape how the store runs:

Shopify Plus for the headroom: B2B, Flow, checkout customization, and the operational features that grow with the business.

Zapiet for pickup and delivery, because it's the most mature solution for genuine retail-bakery scheduling and it integrates cleanly with Shopify Plus.

Shopify Flow for the automation: tagging orders, routing notifications, triggering the right next step for each order type so the team doesn't have to remember the workflow.

Klaviyo email automation for customer lifecycle - welcome series, abandoned cart, post-purchase, occasion reminders.

Rebuy for upsell and recommendations that feel native to the storefront rather than tacked-on.

Search & Discovery for product filtering and intelligent search.

Automated reviews, wishlist, live chat, Instagram feed - the small layers that, together, make the storefront feel modern and complete.

What changed

In the six months since the migration and redesign:

• Sessions up 20%
• Total sales up 19%
• Orders up 18%
• Conversion rate up 19%

But the change that matters most to Kaitlin is the one she mentions herself: the store has finally caught up to what the brand actually is. Customers get an experience that matches the quality of the pastries. The team can manage the operational side without fighting the platform. And the business has room to grow.

Where we are now

The partnership continues. We handle ongoing development, refinements, new features as the business expands. Kaitlin brings ideas - some of them, in her own words, things she "never would have imagined possible" - and we figure out how to make them real on the platform.

A bakery this beloved deserves a storefront this good. It just needed a partner who'd tell her the truth about what it would take to build it.