Case Study
AO Eyewear
Migrating a heritage American eyewear brand from legacy WordPress to a modern headless commerce platform, then further accelerating growth with a full design and brand refresh.
Results
Impact at a Glance
Year 1 Revenue Growth
Additional Year 2 Revenue Growth
Conversion Rate Improvement
The Client
An American Original Since 1833
American Optical (AO Eyewear) is one of America’s oldest and most storied eyewear brands. Their Original Pilot sunglasses were standard issue for U.S. military pilots and were famously worn on the moon during the Apollo missions.
Despite a legendary product and deep brand heritage, their digital presence was held back by aging technology and an outdated web experience that didn’t match the quality of what they make.
The Challenge
Legacy Tech, Modern Vision
AO Eyewear was running on a WordPress/WooCommerce stack that was slow, difficult to maintain, and couldn’t keep up with their eCommerce demands.
- 01Product pages took seconds just for database fetches
- 02Server couldn't handle even modest concurrent traffic without breaking
- 03The brand's digital experience didn't reflect the quality of the product
The Solution
Plan of Attack
Transfer from WordPress to Next.js + Shopify to improve site speed and performance
Implement new branding to improve engagement and UX
In summer 2024, AO Eyewear partnered with Bodhi to migrate from WordPress to a custom headless platform built on Shopify and Next.js. We chose Next.js for the front end to give AO design flexibility and performance, and Shopify for product and checkout management as the most robust foundation for reliable order processing and catalog operations.
Rather than a risky big-bang cutover, we executed an incremental migration. In just seven weeks, we moved AO’s product pages, cart, and checkout onto Shopify, immediately shifting the most critical commerce flows onto a more capable foundation. Over the following two months, we completed the full transition off WordPress, delivering a brand-new headless platform in a total of four months.
Technical Transformation
From Legacy Stack to Modern Commerce
Platform
Frontend
Data Layer
Infrastructure
Year One
Immediate Impact
The impact in the first year was significant. Alongside the technology overhaul, we introduced targeted UX improvements and faster site performance that drove a 66% increase in conversion rate and a 10% lift in average order value. Even with a temporary pause in marketing, revenue grew 52%, a direct reflection of how much more effectively the new site converted the traffic it received.
Performance Gains
Moving from WordPress to a headless Next.js storefront on Vercel resolved the legacy stack's throughput ceiling. Benchmarks of the original pilot product page before and after the migration:
- Logged-in product page database fetches dropped from ~2s to 200–300ms
- Fastest product-page request time improved from 3,116ms to 125ms
- Throughput climbed from 0.99 to 20.59 requests per second under load
- Under a 5-concurrent-user load test, failure rate fell from ~1 in 3 requests to zero
The Ongoing Partnership
Sustained Growth
Our partnership didn’t end at launch. Over the following year, we continued as AO’s conversion optimization, design, and development partner; refining features, evolving the brand experience, and improving site speed and back-end processes.
Today, AO Eyewear is positioned to scale. The platform we built is robust enough to support aggressive marketing investment, and every incremental optimization we make compounds on a foundation designed for growth.
The Numbers
Metrics That Matter
Year one performance improvements doubled the site's conversion effectiveness
Year two sustained momentum through continuous optimization and brand evolution
Increased website efficiency unlocked marketing potential to further increase revenue
“Bodhi didn’t just rebuild our site, they transformed how we do business online. The performance gains were immediate, and their ongoing partnership has been instrumental in our sustained growth.”
Krystal Manganaro
eCommerce Leader, AO Eyewear