Snakestaff Systems
Commerce in BigCommerce, Story in Sanity
- Web Design
- Web Development
- Headless Commerce
- BigCommerce
- Sanity CMS
- Platform Migration
Snakestaff Systems makes emergency hemorrhage control equipment in South Salt Lake City, Utah: tourniquets, holders and trauma kits built small enough to carry every day. Their flagship ETQ Gen 2 is roughly 65% smaller than a traditional windlass tourniquet, and the products are carried by federal agencies and civilians alike. The brand's promise is that the gear is on you when it is needed, and the site had to be as direct as the products are.
- Designed and built a headless storefront on Next.js, BigCommerce and Sanity, first commit to launch in 18 days
- Migrated 62,749 orders and 101,409 line items in two verified runs, tagged so they never count as new-site revenue
- Carried 47,600+ customer accounts across with their order history, with store emails snapshotted and silenced during the import
- Moved 27 gift cards with their original codes, the seven with balances carried to the cent
- Redirected 111 legacy URLs, editable in the CMS without a deploy
- Halved mobile load time in a day: deferred the hero video and third-party scripts, cut the poster from 350 KB to 42 KB, and stopped phones downloading the gallery up front
- Scored 97 and 98 on Lighthouse performance on desktop, and 100 on accessibility on both mobile and desktop
The Challenge
A Storefront That Could Not Hold the Catalogue
Squarespace models a product as rows in a spreadsheet rather than as a matrix, and a Snakestaff sleeve varies by width and colour, each combination with its own SKU, weight and photograph. There was nowhere to write about a product beyond the fields a store gives you, and anything more meant booking engineering time.
Behind it sat the part that makes a replatform frightening rather than tedious: 62,749 orders and 47,600+ customers, and support conversations that all begin with an order number.
The Solution
One System Owns the Numbers, the Other Owns the Words
We designed and built a headless Next.js storefront on one rule: anything with a number a customer pays, or a count that can run out, is read from BigCommerce at request time. Sanity holds the pages, the copy and the navigation, and never stores a price, because a price in a CMS is a price that will eventually be wrong.
The history moved as a resumable job rather than one heroic run. Every order keeps its Squarespace number, so a customer emailing about an order from three years ago is still findable by the number they have.
The Results
A New Storefront That Remembers Everything
Snakestaff launched on a storefront where the catalogue and the content change independently. Marketing writes copy and builds pages in Sanity without a deploy; operations runs pricing, stock and fulfilment in BigCommerce, and the site reflects it on the next request. Nothing was left on the old platform. Every customer kept their account and order history, every gift certificate kept its balance, and every legacy product URL redirects to its replacement.
A performance pass a day after launch halved mobile load time. The hero video and every third-party script now wait until the page has loaded, the video poster came down from 350 KB to 42 KB, and phones stopped downloading the whole product gallery up front: the images loaded before the main product photo fell from 42 to 15, and the product page from about 1,200 KB to 809 KB. Largest contentful paint on a throttled phone went from roughly 10 seconds to between 4.7 and 5.3; on a real mobile viewport the home page paints in about 0.4.
- 18 days
- First commit to launch
- 62,749
- Historical orders migrated
- 101,409
- Order line items carried across
- 47,600+
- Customer accounts carried over
- 1,020
- Verified reviews migrated, 4.74★ average
- Halved
- Mobile load time, 10s to under 5.3s
