Building a cannabis brand's first site, then outgrowing it

Two phases, one client

Phase one is live. We built Flora & Flame’s current site on a page builder. It was the right call at the time: the brand needed an age gate, strain pages, a store locator, merch, a journal, and wholesale contact online quickly, with edits the team could make without a developer. It has carried the brand since.

Phase two is built and waiting to launch. The brand grew faster than the builder could follow. The replacement below is finished and tested, pending a handful of items from the client.

Why replace a site that works

The builder site does its job but looks like a builder site: centered hero, card grids, stock composition. The brand is much stronger than that now. It grows award-winning flower in living soil, and it has a real point of view about both culture and cultivation science. A builder cannot express that, and it cannot hit the speed and search scores a custom build can.

What the rebuild includes

• Every existing URL preserved. All 29 pages from the live site exist in the new one, so search rankings and existing links survive the move. Content was extracted from the old builder’s page data rather than retyped, which keeps it accurate.
• A new visual direction. The first version we built was rejected, fairly, as “pretty much the same thing” with more motion. The second starts from composition instead: poster-scale type, the crest bleeding off the hero, monospace specimen labels and figure captions, a hairline lab grid, and gold-duotone photography. Streetwear on the surface, science underneath.
• Strains as specimens. Each strain gets a specimen-style card with its data laid out like a lab sheet, not a product tile.
• Merch without a store platform. Products sell through Stripe Payment Links, one per variant. No monthly e-commerce fee for a small catalog.
• Motion that holds up. Scroll-driven scenes are tested with an automated scroll script that screenshots each scene and checks for console errors and layout overflow.

Measured before launch

On the finished rebuild, Lighthouse mobile scores 100 for accessibility, best practices, and SEO on every page, with performance between 90 and 99.

What we learned

Starting on a builder was not a mistake. It got the brand online quickly, and the content it collected fed straight into the rebuild. The lesson is knowing when to move on. The second lesson came from our own rejected first draft: adding animation to the same photos in the same layout still reads as the same site. A rebuild has to change composition, type scale, and image treatment first. Motion comes last.