How Atoms sped up development and unblocked the marketing team by switching from Sanity.io to Pack

Meet Atoms—and your new favorite pair of shoes

Founded by a power-house couple from Pakistan—who spent months researching materials and designs—the talented duo finally achieved the quality breakthrough they were looking for, and Atoms was born. Atoms’ shoes are so comfortable and high-quality, they’re actually fun to wear. And now they’re the talk of the town.

The Challenge

Sanity’s time-consuming workflows and a complex UI put a cap on how fast the team could launch & iterate

The Atoms team was using Sanity.io + Hydrogen as a visual CMS to manage their website. While site performance was good, there were still some significant challenges:

• Time-consuming development: Because Sanity tries to embrace most development frameworks, even basic tasks like creating a new section required a lot of content modeling: “Whenever I wanted to create a new module in Sanity, I had to open the repo, create a schema, deploy it, switch the code, create a section and consume the data in the CMS. This took a lot of time," said Matheus.

• Too complex for marketers: Non-technical editors had trouble figuring out where to search for the fields they were trying to edit—which meant development had to step in. For Matheus, this meant: "When marketers got stuck I had to navigate to the right section for them, which meant it was quicker to just update it myself. That meant I had less time to focus on my other tasks. It was missing the point of having a CMS—which is to allow marketers to manage content without needing a developer for every step.”

• Expensive: Because developers had to be so integrated into every workflow, and workflows for marketing and development were complex and time-consuming, costs were higher than they should be. “Beefing up marketing was a big business initiative, so we needed a way for the marketing team to move fast, without having to rely on a developer for every change,” Matheus explained.

To unlock their next wave of growth, the team needed to be able to maximize their efficiency and speed to market, without sacrificing performance gains on their website.

Goals

Simplify and speed up workflows with a CMS that was 1) purpose-built for Hydrogen and 2) easy for marketers to use

Matheus knew exactly what the team needed to succeed: a deep integration with Shopify Hydrogen, and an interface that marketers could interact with easily.

• Built for Hydrogen: Finding a purpose-built platform for Hydrogen was key to boosting development efficiency and keeping maintenance investments low: "Sanity is more generic, it tries to embrace all frameworks. We needed a CMS that was built for Hydrogen. I know how important it is to have out of the box integrations with the Hydrogen ecosystem—Remix, metaobjects, Oxygen, etc. and top-notch support for our product catalog.” —M. Plessmann

• Built for marketers: Having a solution that marketers could navigate confidently by themselves was they only way the team would be able to move faster: "There’s a new movement at Atoms that’s shifting landing pages from a developer’s backlog to putting them directly in the hands of the marketing team—so we can all move faster. We needed a tool that marketers could pick up and run with, no developer required.”—M. Plessmann

Finally, the solution had to be cost effective so that the ROI made sense.

Evaluation

Pack’s powerful DX and intuitive editor immediately stood out

When Matheus searched for Hydrogen CMS alternatives to Sanity, and saw Pack as a featured Partner on the Shopify Hydrogen page, he quickly realized the Pack platform was exactly what the team needed: "I read the documentation and quickly decided it was the solution we needed. I know the Hydrogen Remix ecosystem, I know how important it is to be very integrated into a framework and ecosystem, and Pack does this perfectly."

But just to be sure, Matheus went even deeper: “I read all the code in Pack’s open-source repository Blueprint—for the homepage, the PDP— it’s pretty good and simple, well-written, it handles separation of concerns nicely, all of the things that are important. Especially for an open-source repo it’s well done. I used the documentation and the repo, and this experience was perfect in my opinion.”

Solution

In less than two months, Matheus has completed the Sanity / Pack migration and was handing off content management to marketers

“I didn’t think it’d go so fast—it took me one and a half months to do the complete migration from Sanity to Pack, and that’s because I was working on it by myself as a single developer. It was very straightforward, even though I still had my normal tasks to complete as well.” -M. Plessmann

The secret to the quick turnaround? Matheus referenced Pack’s Hydrogen theme Blueprint to understand Pack’s recommendations for implementing the storefront, and was able to copy many of the open-source sections to speed up the process. Plus, he was able to tap into Pack’s development workflows that were faster and more efficient than Sanity's:

In addition to rapid-fire content creation, Matheus loves the cache long feature that makes it easier than ever to manage site performance:

“If you don’t keep performance in mind every time you push code, it’s very easy for it to drop. Pack reduces development mistakes by having a cache long feature—by far my favorite—because we can set cache long and Pack will refresh cache as long as we publish content. It’s another example of how Pack stands out. It even gave us a slight boost in terms of performance—5-8% increase—because we couldn’t use a cache long strategy with Sanity.”

While the developer experience is powerful, the content management experience in Pack was an even bigger win for the marketing team:

“For people who aren’t technical, I know Pack is an even greater win because It's much easier to understand how and where to edit content—very similar to editing a Shopify theme.”—M. Plessmann

Matheus is almost ready to launch his custom library of sections that the marketing team can use to create landing pages. They can change mix and match sections, add images, videos, or other media, change the order of elements, styling, background, text alignment—everything without developer intervention.

Results

Development is faster, marketing is unblocked, and Atoms has finally found the perfect CMS they’ll stick with for years.

With a Hydrogen-focused CMS and efficient workflows for the whole team, Atoms is poised to continue their breakout growth:

With a platform that’s built for Hydrogen and empowers marketers with intuitive content management, Atoms has the stack they were looking for to unlock their next wave of growth—both with a dynamic, performant storefront and dedicated shopping pages that give them full control over their shopping experience.