Before / After.

cbd.restaurant — Headless Hemp & THCa E-Commerce Rebuild

Replaced a legacy BigCommerce storefront with a purpose-built Next.js headless e-commerce platform for hemp-derived CBD/THCa products. The rebuild emphasizes compliance-first design, dual-mode order fulfillment (card checkout for legal hemp/THCa; pay-on-delivery for future marijuana SKUs), real-time inventory, and multi-channel customer notifications (email/SMS/web-push). Achieves feature parity with BigCommerce while reducing compliance surface and enabling direct control over payment, fulfillment, and customer journeys.

• 50 products live (6 hemp + 44 THCa)
• 7,228 lines of TypeScript code
• 16 Postgres tables, dual-mode fulfillment logic
• 3 notification channels (email/SMS/push)

• Hemp / CBD

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Big Moose Hemp: Wix Platform Prison to Headless Medusa

Big Moose Hemp migrated from a locked-in Wix storefront to a fully-owned headless architecture — Medusa 2.x commerce backend on Railway + Next.js 15 storefront on Vercel, live at new.bigmoosehemp.com. The rebuild was forced by a hard regulatory deadline: the November 12, 2026 federal hemp ban (P.L. 119-37) that outlaws ~86% of the current catalog, making Wix's V1 schema, deprecated APIs, and single payment rail a business blocker. A three-phase compliance strategy (Liquidation → Sunset → Post-ban) is baked into the schema so the cutoff is driven by per-SKU total-THC data, not a midnight content edit. The team shipped 551 TypeScript files across 229 commits with complete parity to legacy order/customer data (142 historical Wix orders materialized + a consent-stratified 23,924-contact archive), compliance automation (total-THC per SKU, state ship-block enforcement), real payment rails (Clover high-risk processor), an IMAP-verified transactional email + SMS chain, a live Medusa-backed mobile admin, and a 24/7 Slack-fed AI approval queue where agents draft and only the owner ships. The same backend that started as a survival migration is now the operating spine for the whole brand.

• 229 commits from Apr 19 → Jun 30, 2026
• 142 historical Wix orders + 16,881 customers migrated with consent
• 551 source files (TS/TSX); 8 test suites
• Live at new.bigmoosehemp.com (Vercel) + Railway backend

• Hemp / CBD

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Velcro.music — a record-label hero that actually swings

Rebuilt velcrowrecords.com — a 2,338-line single-file static site on Netlify — into velcro.music on Next.js 16. The signature chain-and-skull pendant used to be a flat image on a fixed CSS keyframe; now it swings on a real verlet pendulum through a drifting SF-fog band, with the skull's diamond eyes glinting at each apex. Under the hero: a typed product catalog, consent-first notifications, and a hardened header set — plus a per-link articulated-chain engine reconstructed from the single product photo.

• Single-file 2,338-line Netlify/Snipcart site → Next.js 16 App Router on Vercel
• Hero: fixed 4s CSS-keyframe swing → verlet pendulum + drifting SF-fog + diamond-eye glints, 60fps
• Per-link articulated-chain engine reconstructed from one product photo — pixel-exact at rest
• Hardened: CSP + HSTS + 5 more headers; products as Zod-validated records; reduced-motion fallback

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WordPress → Next.js for a regional SEO leader

Took over the #1 organic site in its market — a 5.0-star Best-of-Southland SEO operator running on aging WordPress + Elementor. Migrated to Next.js without losing a single ranking, then added a client dashboard the legacy stack couldn't support.

• 0% ranking drop across 600+ tracked keywords
• 9× faster TTFB (1.8s → 200ms p75)
• Client dashboard added (formerly unsupported)
• Headless content pipeline (Notion → MDX)

• Local Pro Services

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Fuel1st — 2014 WordPress brochure to a 2026 Next.js operating surface

Fuel1st had been running on the same WordPress brochure since 2014, designed and maintained by an outside agency. The entire site was four nav links, a tagline, a quote, and a footer credit — roughly fifty words of copy. Rebuilt from scratch on Next.js 14 + Tailwind in a 43-hour sprint: six structured services, hero stats, self-hosted aviation photography, a four-source aviation news aggregator with a competitor filter, and three motion polish passes — all on operator-owned infrastructure, deployable in seconds.

• ~50 words → multi-page operating surface
• WordPress (2014, third-party agency) → Next.js 14 (operator-owned, 2026)
• 0 services listed → 6 (Fuel Supply, Trip Support, Logistics, Flight Planning, Ground Handling, SAF)
• 0 hero imagery → self-hosted aviation photography throughout

• Aviation

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Ballair / Fuel First / 7Air — operating-group brochure + allowlist admin + federal bid agent

Stood up the digital footprint for a three-entity aviation operating group: Fuel First International (fueling + bunker, CAGE 77SM4), Ballair Aviation Holdings (Boeing 767F + holding entities), and 7Air Cargo (three 737-800SFs, FAA Part 121, acquired May 2026). The deliverable is three layers: a public brochure at ballairaviation.com, a hard-allowlist admin dashboard for the operator, and an Anthropic-backed federal-bid drafting agent that scouts SAM.gov on the operating-group's real CAGE/UEI and drafts compliant bid sections without ever inventing a capability or auto-submitting.

• 3 federal entities under one ops surface
• 28 SAM.gov keyword-scope categories — one-click into live searches
• Drafting agent: 7 bid sections, Anthropic-backed, hard never-invent rules
• Allowlist admin: zero signup surface, sessions in Postgres

• Aviation

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BMH payment rails — Wix payments to a two-rail Medusa module with hard caps

Big Moose Hemp ran customer payments through WIX-PAY-PRO + Square. Hemp/CBD is a high-risk MID category and the federal hemp ban (P.L. 119-37, effective Nov 12 2026) accelerates the need to move off a stack that doesn't expose payment-policy controls. The rebuild ships a two-rail payment provider abstraction inside the BMH Medusa 2.x backend — Clover (card, capped at $250) via Global Payments Solutions ISO for the high-risk MID, and Aeropay (ACH) for any purchase over the cap and for the 50% deposit on bulk clone orders. Hard caps are enforced at three levels — admin, API, and storefront — so no path can bypass them.

• 2 payment rails (Clover card + Aeropay ACH) under one Medusa module
• Hard $250 card cap enforced at admin + API + storefront
• 13-method contract surface across the two providers
• Feature-flagged rail toggle (FEATURE_CLOVER_CARD_RAIL)

• Hemp / CBD
• Local Pro Services

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Buck Mountain Cannabis — buckmountaincannabis.com → buckmountain.farm

Brand restart on a new domain. The legacy site was a static brochure; the rebuild restructures the catalog around the actual sales channel — flower, rosin, extracts, trim, smalls, plus a pharma category that ships when its supply line is ready. Wires Nabis (wholesale), Metrc (batch compliance), and OgLife.app (QR rewards) into one storefront.

• Domain cutover with 301s from buckmountaincannabis.com
• Nabis wholesale API + Metrc batch compliance integrated
• OgLife QR rewards wired in for cross-brand identity
• Shared chat widget with BMH and LGP

• Hemp / CBD

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Let's Go Paint — pottery brochure to Square-source-of-truth headless commerce

Seal Beach paint-your-own-pottery studio (1065 Pacific Coast Hwy). The legacy site was a brochure with limited booking. Rebuilt on the same headless stack as BMH and Buck Mountain — Next 15 storefront + Medusa 2.x backend — with Square as the catalog + payment source of truth so anything ringing through the POS lands in the storefront automatically. Multi-domain strategy (.com, .art, .space, .org) collapsed into one storefront with brand variants per host.

• 4 owned domains → 1 storefront with brand variants
• Square is catalog + payment source of truth
• Klaviyo (email) + Shippo (fulfillment) + Synthflow (voice) + Plausible (analytics)
• Phase 1 visual contract pinned to a static HTML reference

• Painting & Trades
• Local Pro Services

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OgLife.app — one identity layer across a 17-domain portfolio

Each brand in the portfolio had its own opt-in, its own chat widget, its own customer record. A customer who liked two brands ended up as two strangers in two databases. OgLife.app is the cross-business identity + preferences + live-chat layer that sits between the brands and the customer — one opt-in, one preferences page, one inbox. Built on Cloudflare Workers + Durable Objects + Neon, with an embeddable 7KB chat widget that any brand storefront drops in.

• 1 identity layer across 17 brand surfaces
• 7KB embeddable chat widget
• AI autoreply at 45s when no agent is online
• Inquiry → push notification: <30 seconds

• Hemp / CBD
• Painting & Trades
• Aviation

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DJ Jackie J — bland WordPress to a three-offer entertainment brand

Took over a 12-year wedding & event DJ's online presence — a half-built WordPress site, three Instagram handles she manually managed, inquiries that took 24+ hours to answer. Shipped a real marketing site, wired consent-first SMS opt-ins for repeat-booking, and stood up an agent backbone that drafts ads, scrapes local OC event listings, and pushes inquiries to her phone the moment they land. Then the brand outgrew the booth: 2026-07 shipped Jackie J & The Diamonds — a configurable 5–11-piece live show band — plus an Acoustic Duo, turning a DJ site into a three-offer entertainment brand (DJ · live band · acoustic) with a cinematic /band page and a live promo reel, merged and live on both domains.

• 5★ across The Knot / WeddingWire / Thumbtack preserved through cutover
• Inquiry → notification latency: 24h → <30s (push)
• Bid submission flow: manual → draft-for-review agent
• Live event-vendor scraping across OC public listings

• Local Pro Services
• Events & Entertainment

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Homeward Bound Veterans — Squarespace brochure to a veteran-services platform

A veteran-led 501(c)(3) fighting veteran homelessness was running on a Squarespace template — 19-link nav, leftover demo store pages, donate buttons that left the site, and no way for a veteran to do anything but call. Rebuilt as a Next.js platform: help-seeker-first public site grounded in the org's real records, a magic-link veteran portal for medical documents and appointments, an admin HQ with an all-client calendar, and SES transactional rails that remind every vet 24 hours before an appointment.

• Squarespace brochure → veteran portal + admin HQ, live in one build day
• Magic-link → confirmation email: SES E2E verified in production
• Template leftovers ('Harvest Moon Cup — $25' demo store) → 0 dead pages
• Appointment reminders: none → hourly cron, 24h ahead, email + SMS-ready

• Local Pro Services

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Porto Verde — a parked domain to a procurement-grade cannabis-lab site, in one build (plus a zero-downtime domain migration)

Porto Verde is a licensed Long Beach cannabis & hemp micro-processor — extraction, co-pack, and branding for other people's brands. It had a registered domain and a real lab, and nothing online: no brand, no services, no way for a brand to reach them. This was a greenfield build, not a rebuild — a from-scratch Next.js 15 site with an industrial-premium design system, nine in-house service pages plus equipment / compliance / packaging / facility / about, a 100 MB browser-direct artwork-intake pipeline, and lead email wired straight into the owner's own self-hosted mail server. Built loud and honest: every unverifiable number — throughput, MOQ, the DCC license — ships as a visible TBC instead of an invented fact.

• 0 pages → 21 routes shipped in one build (11 core pages + 9 service detail pages + 404)
• 100 MB browser-direct artwork uploads (presigned to object storage, past Vercel's 4.5 MB function cap)
• Lead email runs on the owner's own self-hosted Stalwart server — zero third-party email vendor
• Honest engine: DCC license + throughput/MOQ ship as visible TBC, never invented

• Hemp / CBD

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Opulent Life — an Instagram-only sea-moss brand, given a website that actually sells

Opulent Life is a Venice Beach boardwalk micro-brand making wildcrafted Irish sea moss gels and cold-pressed juices. Its entire web presence was a single Instagram account with a flyer graphic for a menu and "DM to order" as the whole storefront. This was a greenfield build, not a rebuild: a from-scratch Next.js 15 single-page site with all eleven products given real crawlable pages, an honest nutrient-grounded benefits section, and a full local-SEO surface — built by a fan-out of research + copy agents. Then it was folded into the oglife.app platform: its own subdomain (opulentseamoss.oglife.app), a self-hosted Stalwart inbox (opulentlife@oglife.app), a consumer Web-Push opt-in for drops and boardwalk locations, and a bright design system re-themed straight off the brand's own round logo to match the Instagram feed.

• 0 websites → a 14-section single-page site on its own oglife.app subdomain
• 11 products given real pages: 4 gels + 7 cold-pressed juices, real ingredients + prices as crawlable text
• Owns its stack: Stalwart inbox (opulentlife@oglife.app) + VAPID Web-Push opt-in (Neon-backed), no SaaS in the path
• Honest engine: nutrient-grounded benefits + FDA disclaimer; 1 verified IG comment, zero invented reviews

• Restaurants
• Local Pro Services

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B Your Best — a smoke-shop supplement line given a compliance-guarded storefront

B Your Best sells a four-SKU supplement line (B HARD / B LEAN / B SMART / B HAPPY, plus a counter-top Tower display) through smoke shops — a channel where the marketing language that sells the product is exactly the language that gets it banned. The build is a full e-commerce platform live at byourbestallday.com: storefront, multi-step checkout, a rep QR portal with a 20% commission ledger, a wholesale tier gate, and an admin console — with a CI compliance guard that fails the build if a banned drug-name marketing term ever lands in code or copy. Payments run through a Clover adapter currently in stub mode pending the merchant creds; everything else is production.

• 4 supplement SKUs + Tower display, live at byourbestallday.com
• Rep QR portal: per-rep attribution + 20% commission ledger
• CI compliance guard — banned drug terms fail the build, not the review
• Full domain wiring: Hostinger → Cloudflare → Vercel + Stalwart mail

• Smoke Shops

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cbd.domains — the before/after engine forked into a high-risk showcase

Cannabis case studies create an SEO problem for a general-purpose portfolio: high-risk content bleeds into how search and ad platforms classify the whole domain. The answer is segregation as architecture — cbd.domains is a full fork of the zsty.us engine (this site), rebranded by eight parallel agents working disjoint file clusters, holding the cannabis/CBD case-study catalog under its own legal entity. The cannabis /seo engine is live, with generated OG cards, sitemap/robots, Organization schema, hub cross-links, and llms.txt shipped. The showcase runs at cbd-domains.vercel.app until the apex domain is attached.

• Full engine fork: the zsty.us before/after machinery, rebranded end-to-end
• 8 parallel rebrand agents over disjoint file clusters — no merge conflicts
• Cannabis /seo engine live + OG cards, sitemap, org schema, llms.txt
• SEO risk-segregation: high-risk case studies isolated from zsty.us

• Hemp / CBD

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Let's Go Paint Foundation — a 501(c)(3) site built inside compliance guardrails

The letsgopaint.org foundation is a separate legal entity from the Let's Go Paint studio LLC — a nonprofit bringing paint programs to communities — which is exactly why its site is a standalone Next.js 15 repo outside the commercial monorepo. The build maps a 21-route sitemap from the foundation's v6 content document, ships privacy/terms, and enforces the two guardrails that keep a young nonprofit honest: no paint-party sales anywhere on the foundation surface (that's the LLC's business, and mixing them endangers the exemption), and donation receipt language that correctly reflects pending-IRS-determination status instead of promising deductibility the entity doesn't yet have.

• Separate entity, separate repo — the corporate boundary is an architecture decision
• 21-route sitemap mapped from the v6 content doc
• Pending-IRS receipt language enforced — no premature deductibility claims
• No paint-party sales on the foundation surface, by rule

• Nonprofits & Causes
• Painting & Trades

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