Ellis Brooklyn
Website Design & Shopify Development
Garden Winds
Garden Winds helps outdoor enthusiasts find the exact replacement canopy for their gazebo or patio structure, matched right down to the model number. We moved them off an aging Magento store and onto Shopify Plus without losing a decade of catalog, customer, and order history. In their first full month on the new store, sales were up 24% year over year.
The Brand
America's go-to for a replacement that actually fits
Garden Winds sells replacement canopies and accessories matched to specific gazebos and patio structures by exact model number. Their shoppers usually arrive hunting for one precise part, so fast, accurate product discovery sits at the center of the business.
The Challenge
A storefront the team couldn't run without developers
For years the business ran on Magento, and the platform had become a liability. The site was slow and prone to outages, worst of all during the spring peak when Garden Winds can least afford to be offline. Behind the storefront it was brittle: adding a feature meant rebuilding the application, which routinely broke something else and left the business reliant on a single developer for logic so custom no one could fully explain it. A past platform move had also cost them organic traffic, so they had every reason to be cautious about migrating again.
”We came from a very complex, developer-reliant Magento setup, and Newthink helped us transition to a clean, manageable Shopify store that our team can largely handle on our own — that alone has been invaluable.”
What We Did
Off Magento, with a decade of orders and rankings intact
We rebuilt the storefront on Shopify Plus and managed the full cutover from Magento, carrying over years of catalog, customer, and order history so the brand never faced a gap in data or a pause in selling. Because a past migration had cost them organic traffic, we treated search continuity as a first-class concern, mapping every page, category, and product to its new Shopify URL and pairing those redirects with an SEO plan built to carry their hard-won rankings across intact.
From there we swapped brittle, developer-dependent customizations for maintainable, purpose-built tools the team can run on their own, and went beyond the original scope to keep the back office in place, connecting the brand with a vendor to migrate their data into their existing ERP.
”What really stood out was Newthink’s attention to detail throughout the entire process. Nothing slipped through the cracks, and they made sure every aspect of the migration was handled thoughtfully.”
The Results
24% year-over-year sales growth in the first full month on Shopify Plus
The lift showed up almost immediately after launch. Just as valuable was the shift in how the business runs: the team handles everyday updates themselves instead of routing them through a developer, and the unexplained peak-season downtime that plagued the old site is gone.
[STAT NEEDED: reliability or uptime gain, or reduction in developer-dependent maintenance]
[STAT NEEDED: search ranking retention or organic traffic figure post-launch]
“What sets Newthink apart from developers we’ve worked with in the past is that they’re not just focused on completing a project — they’re invested in building a lasting relationship. We’re so glad we had the opportunity to work with Newthink, and we look forward to continuing to partner together.”
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