A Design-Led Brand Boxed In by a Theme
Chilly's is a British brand built on design. Its reusable bottles, cups, and food pots come in a constantly changing range of colours, prints, and limited editions, and the brand experience matters as much as the product.
The store couldn't keep up. A theme decides what a page is allowed to look like, so every new idea ran into the same walls: layouts that couldn't be changed, personalised pages that couldn't be built, and workarounds that added cost every time the team pushed past what the template allowed. Chilly's needed a store shaped around the brand, not a brand squeezed into a store.
Headless, Built Around the Brand.
01.
Headless Architecture on Commerce Layer
We separated the commerce engine from the storefront. Commerce Layer runs products, pricing, carts, and checkout through its API, so the front end is free to look and behave however the brand needs, without a theme deciding what is possible. Six third-party integrations were connected to the new stack.
02.
Custom Frontend Built for Speed
Every page was designed and built from scratch around Chilly's design language, with performance built in from the start. Pages now load in 1.8 seconds, the storefront scores 96/100 on Lighthouse and 94/100 on mobile, and LCP improved by 38%.
03.
12 Custom and Personalised Page Templates
With the storefront under full control, we built 12 custom page templates that a theme simply cannot produce, and optimised more than 45 product pages. Collections, campaigns, and product stories each get a page made for them, not a reskinned template.
04.
A Leaner, Cheaper Stack
Going headless removed the workarounds the old setup depended on. We removed 8 apps that were doing jobs the platform should do, and running costs came down 31%, all delivered in a 10-week build.
“The team at Ecomm Wizards understood what we wanted to achieve with Chilly's and translated that into a storefront that feels much closer to our brand. Moving to a headless setup on Commerce Layer gave us greater flexibility over the design, customer experience, and how we manage the store. The process was well handled, and we're pleased with the result.”
James Butterfield
Founder, Chilly's Bottles
