BrandAlley: Magento 1 to Magento 2 on Hyvä

The brief.

BrandAlley runs flash sales. The traffic arrives in a wall, buys for an hour, and leaves. Magento 1 had reached end-of-life and the Luma front end could not hold the first minute of a drop. Develo Design brought me in to lead the migration to Magento 2 on Hyvä, working alongside BrandAlley's in-house engineers in London.

Approach.

I started with the cart. A stock reservation layer holds items for fifteen minutes once added, so shoppers can browse the rest of a sale without losing what they have. From there I rebuilt the storefront as a small library of AlpineJS widgets on Hyvä, kept the flash-sale preview tool working behind Varnish using Magento's private content blocks, and repaired the Algolia and Mirakl wiring the merchandising team relied on.

What I shipped.

• 01Stock reservation system with a 15-minute cart hold, sized for flash-sale peak load
• 02Reusable AlpineJS widget library on Hyvä, replacing duplicated Luma components
• 03Flash-sale preview module made Varnish-safe via Magento private content blocks
• 04Core Web Vitals work: critical CSS, font loading, and lazy image pipelines
• 05Algolia search repaired against the Mirakl marketplace feed
• 06Release branching, code review cadence, and CI/CD pipeline for the in-house team
• 07Post-launch GA4 and Google Tag Manager fixes for accurate purchase tracking

“The stock reservation alone changed how we run a drop. Customers stopped losing their baskets at 10:01 on a Thursday.”

Outcome.

PageSpeed scores tripled. Page load time fell 85 percent. Mobile conversion lifted 24 percent in the first quarter after launch. The in-house team kept the codebase I handed back, and the widget library is still the pattern they build against.