Tecovas.com

Tecovas makes handmade western boots, leather goods, and apparel, and tecovas.com is where most of that business happens, carrying the full catalog alongside the kind of editorial and storytelling content a heritage brand lives on. The site handles everything from browsing and fit guidance through checkout, account management, and returns.

Tecovas.com was a Liquid theme running on Shopify's standard platform, which had carried the company well through its early growth but had quietly become the thing standing between us and the experience we wanted to build. I architected a move to Hydrogen, Shopify's React framework, which handed us full control of the front end while keeping the commerce backend we already trusted underneath, and our team rebuilt the storefront on top of it and cut over in a single release. In the year that followed, our ecommerce growth went from just under five percent year over year to nearly thirty two percent.

A rebuild is only worth the trouble if the people working in the thing every day come out ahead, and for us that meant our marketing team, who had been filing tickets any time they wanted to move a hero or launch a campaign page. Alongside the Hydrogen work we moved our content into Sanity and built a page builder out of typed modules, so a marketer can now compose a page out of heroes, product grids, and editorial blocks, preview exactly how it will look, and publish it without an engineer ever opening a pull request.

With a codebase this size the bottleneck stops being how fast you can write code and becomes how fast you can review it safely, so I built two AI systems into our pipeline to take that pressure off. The first scores every incoming pull request on blast radius rather than diff size, on the logic that a two line query change touching every collection page is far riskier than an eighty-eight file Storybook reorganization, which lets reviewers spend their attention where it actually matters. The second is what we call the 'patching robot', which picks up production errors as they're reported, traces the root cause back through the codebase, and opens a pull request with a fix, all inside a tight set of guardrails that keep it out of our configuration and off our protected branches.

Speed and accessibility are the two things easiest to promise and hardest to keep, so we wired both into the pipeline instead of leaving them to periodic audits. Our unit suite runs accessibility assertions against components as they're built, which means a regression fails a build rather than surfacing in a report six months later, and we lean on Hydrogen's streaming and caching model to keep things quick even on the deep faceted collection pages that tend to be the slowest part of any store this size.