Retail
Loomcraft Goods ditches its framework, keeps its speed
An editorial look inside a zero-dependency storefront migration
An editorial look inside a zero-dependency storefront migration
Loomcraft Goods ran a beloved storefront for nine years on a stack that had quietly become unmaintainable. Every seasonal refresh meant wrestling with a bloated component library and a build pipeline that took twelve minutes to compile a single CSS change. When their lead developer left, the team faced a choice: hire a specialist to keep the old system alive, or start over with something radically simpler.
They chose CSS Vars Framework. What follows is an inside look at the six-week rebuild, told through the eyes of the two engineers who did it.
"We stopped fighting our tools. The entire storefront is one CSS file and semantic HTML — nothing to compile, nothing to break."
The audit found 46 unused component variants and three competing spacing scales. Nobody remembered why.
Before — three spacing scales, 12-minute builds
After — one token file, zero build step
Working section by section — product grid, cart drawer, checkout — the pair replaced each component with framework primitives, deleting far more code than they wrote. By week four the CSS bundle had shrunk from 640kB to 61kB.
Time-to-interactive dropped from 6.4s to 3.1s on a throttled connection. Bounce rate on mobile fell within the first week of launch.