Skip to content

House of Staunton

We moved America's top chess retailer off Magento and onto a single Shopify Plus foundation, three storefronts and all. Nine months after launch, revenue is up nearly 20%.

The Brand

America's chess authority, across three storefronts

House of Staunton makes and sells just about anything the game calls for, from tournament sets to luxury collector pieces. The business runs three closely related stores off one shared catalog: a direct-to-consumer site, Wholesale Chess for volume buyers, and US Chess Sales for institutional customers.

House of Staunton logo

The Challenge

A platform that punished every good idea

For years all three sites ran on Magento, and the platform had become a cage. It was slow, couldn’t pass Core Web Vitals, and drained budget and staff time into just keeping it upright, with new features about as likely to break a site as improve it. Checkout was a prime example, so fragile the team didn’t dare touch it despite a long list of ideas for it. On top of that, the move carried real technical complexity, from keeping three native multi-stores in sync to an intricate bundling setup where changing one product’s price meant editing it across hundreds of bundles.

"I felt like I was stuck in an abusive relationship with Magento."

Shawn Sullivan, Owner, House of Staunton
House of Staunton's 1849 Cooke luxury chess set, ebony and boxwood pieces mid-game on a wooden board

What We Did

Three storefronts, one codebase, and features they couldn't build before

We migrated all three storefronts onto Shopify Plus and unified them under one custom theme codebase, so any new feature is built once and ships to all three. A custom PIM keeps their hundreds of product attributes in sync across every store, getting them close to single-store management despite running three.

We rebuilt their bundling with metaobjects so each price is set once and shared everywhere, ending both the mispricing risk and the heavy manual effort it used to take. Their signature bundle builder and visualizer was rebuilt on Shopify’s cart transform API. And on checkout, where they’d been most constrained before, the doors are open to a slew of new features, including a new Collector’s Club membership running on Shopify Subscriptions and Shopify Functions.

The House of Staunton chess set builder: a wood selected in step one, board and box steps to go, and the total price as configured
The three storefronts on phones: US Chess Sales, House of Staunton, and Wholesale Chess, all running on one Shopify Plus codebase

The Results

Nearly 20% revenue growth, and the best holiday season yet

The build went from kickoff to first launch in about three months, and because it went live just ahead of the holiday season, House of Staunton posted their best BFCM on record. In the first year on Shopify Plus, revenue grew nearly 20%, organic clicks rose 39% year over year, and impressions more than doubled. All three sites pass Core Web Vitals, something they could never do on Magento.

~20%

revenue growth since launch

+39%

organic search clicks (YoY)

19%

lower platform costs (three stores vs one Magento install)

"Newthink moved mountains to get three stores launched right before the holidays. We had a better holiday season than we could have hoped for, on a platform that has opened up a world of unlimited possibilities for us."

Shawn Sullivan, Owner, House of Staunton

Explore more work