Lamey Wellehan is a family-owned shoe business with six locations across Maine and more than a century of trading behind it. Generations of Mainers have been fitted for school shoes, work boots and winter treads in the same stores their parents were.
Most replatforming projects begin with a decision. This one began with a notice.
The ecommerce system Lamey Wellehan's online store ran on was acquired, and the new owner announced they were shutting it down. There was no version of staying. No phased evaluation, no year to weigh options against a roadmap — just a point after which the storefront would stop existing, and a business with six stores, ChainDrive already running the operation, and a hundred years of customers who would notice.
That is the least forgiving way to change platforms. A voluntary migration can slip a quarter. A forced one cannot slip at all, and every decision inside it gets made against a clock somebody else set.
We moved them to Shopify inside the window.
The storefront was the visible half. The harder half was everything behind it: six locations' worth of inventory that had to read correctly online, and ChainDrive — the retail ERP that already ran the stores, the stock and the registers — which was not going to be replaced to suit a website. The integration had to bend toward the system the stores were already using, not the other way round. A shoe retailer cannot retrain six locations and change its back office in the same season it loses its website.
Sequencing did most of the work. Under a fixed external deadline the temptation is to do everything at once and hope; the discipline is deciding what genuinely has to be live on day one and what can follow safely afterwards. The catalog, the inventory feed, the ChainDrive integration and a storefront that looked like the stores had to ship together. Photography, campaign work and the email platform came later, once the business was no longer standing on a platform with a shutdown date.
We rebuilt the product presentation while everything was already in pieces, because that is the only cheap moment to do it. A migration is the one time a catalog is being touched end to end anyway.
Lamey Wellehan went live on Shopify before the old platform closed, with one catalog behind six stores and an online storefront, and ChainDrive still doing its job underneath.
The engagement did not end there. What was scoped as an emergency became an ongoing relationship — the email platform migration, the campaign work and the photography direction that followed are on this site as their own projects. That is usually the tell for whether a rescue was handled properly. Nobody keeps working with the agency that got them through a bad quarter unless the quarter was handled well.
They knew our company and understood clearly our goals.
Chris S., Director — Lamey Wellehan Shoes
Nobody chooses the timing of a forced migration, which is exactly why it reveals what an agency is for.
A platform shutdown removes the two things that normally make replatforming manageable: time, and the option to do nothing. What remains is judgment — knowing which parts of a build genuinely have to exist on day one, which can follow in month two, and which the client is asking for out of anxiety rather than need. Get that wrong in either direction and you either miss the date or ship something the stores cannot actually run.
The second lesson is about the back office. ChainDrive runs the stores, the stock and the registers, and staff across six locations know it. A system like that is not up for renegotiation because a website is in trouble. The instinct to modernize everything at once is the most expensive instinct in this kind of project. The ERP stayed. The website changed around it.
Which is why the useful measure of a rescue is not whether the site launched on time. It is whether the client kept working with you afterwards.
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