A Full Shopify Rebuild in Three Weeks — Live One Day Before Launch

Who is Zesty Snackz?

Zesty Snackz sells freeze-dried sour candy and dried fruit direct to consumers at zestysnackz.com. The brand was built on short-form video — the homepage still opens with “Sour. Thin. Viral.” — and roughly 90% of store sessions come from mobile. The company runs on Shopify, ships nationally in the US, and operates a physical storefront alongside the online store. Founder and CEO Brenten S. runs it.

They found us through Shopify. In Brenten’s words, on July 17, 2026: “It was actually Shopify AI rep software that recommended you guys as a certified Shopify developer. Which I thought was pretty cool haha.”

What was the challenge?

The brief that started the relationship, sent June 29, 2026, was four lines long: “My name is Brenten Szekely, the founder of Zesty Snackz Inc. We are looking for a rebrand and to optimize flows. Would love to get on a call soon.” Underneath that sat three problems and a firm deadline.

The theme was too old to build on. Zesty Snackz wanted animation, video sections and product cards that move when you hover over them — the brand sells on short-form video, and the site needed to feel like it. The old theme could not support any of that, and adding to it meant fixing pre-existing bugs first. Most of the three weeks would have gone into repairs instead of the new site.

There was no subscription program at all. No subscription app installed, no reviews app either. The stated goals — push average order value from $26 past $40, and reach 5,000 active subscribers — had nothing on the site to deliver them.

Product URLs had been broken for months. Products duplicated in Shopify never had their handles updated: Pink Lemonade sat on /cherry-copy, Pineapple Dried Fruit on /pink-lemonade-copy, Banana on /pineapple-dried-fruit-copy. Google was indexing the mismatched URLs, and SEO title and description fields were empty on nearly every product. And all of it had to be resolved in three weeks — before the meet-and-greet where the boat giveaway would be announced.

How did Lantern Sol approach it?

One decision shaped everything after it: stop repairing the old theme and fork Shopify’s Horizon theme as a clean build. That reads as the slower path. It was the faster one. Rebuilding templates on a modern foundation removed an entire class of bugs we would otherwise have spent three weeks chasing — bugs that were not ours and would have resurfaced after launch.

The second decision was to make the bundle builder the destination of the entire site, not a page in the navigation. Every collection card, every product CTA, every subscription message routes to one place where a customer assembles a box. That is the page that moves average order value, so that is the page the site was built around.

The third was sequencing. We scoped backwards from the due date and worked our plan — design approved first, development in parallel tracks, QA against a preview theme, production the day before the event.

What did we build?

The storefront. A full Shopify build on a Horizon theme fork: a homepage with two custom GSAP physics animations, a draggable product wheel and scroll-triggered illumination; a deliberately animation-free product page with a sticky pack-and-subscribe selector, per-product flavor stats and a brand-styled Judge.me reviews widget; a collection page with native Search & Discovery filters and a mobile filter drawer; a cart drawer that visually separates subscription line items from one-time items; a wholesale page with pricing hidden behind a routed inquiry form; and a giveaway page built as a reusable pattern for the giveaways that follow.

The bundle builder. Four tiers, an animated boat-fill progress visual, a “Surprise Me” button that fills the box with random in-stock flavors, a three-bag minimum, subscription-by-default with a one-time toggle, and the selling plan carried cleanly through to checkout.

Subscriptions. Zesty Snackz went from no subscription infrastructure to a four-tier program in three weeks. Subscribers manage it themselves from the account page — swap flavors between cycles, move up or down a tier, add one-time products to an upcoming shipment, pause or cancel, and choose between “keep this box” and “surprise me every month.”

The live counter. The homepage counter is not decoration. It is seeded at 37,500,000 bites and wired to real order data, incrementing on every order with a per-SKU multiplier — 150 bites per candy bag, 25 per bag of dried fruit. Brenten, by email on July 28: “I saw the counter; so far it looks sick!!”

Store hygiene and on-page SEO. We corrected the mis-slugged product handles and put 301 redirects in place so indexed URLs kept their equity, rewrote five product descriptions containing raw pasted markup, filled the empty SEO title and description fields across nearly the whole catalogue, standardized an inconsistent vendor name, normalized size options, and fixed a product showing zero inventory.

The creator program. Zesty Snackz wanted a creator army, not an affiliate app install. We researched the Shopify affiliate apps against what the program actually needed — a public application form, a merchant dashboard for approve/reject, and a creator portal where an approved creator finds their own code — implemented the one the client picked (GoAff Pro), and built the program on top of it: a public leaderboard, manual approval with hand-built discount codes, and a monthly reward structure the client runs off the leaderboard.

Hear from the client

What were the results?

The launch date held. The site went live on July 24 — one day before the meet-and-greet the entire engagement was scoped around. The rebuild took three weeks; at normal capacity the same scope is roughly a four-week build.

Zesty Snackz rated Lantern Sol 5 out of 5 for communication and 5 out of 5 for quality of work in a public Shopify Partners review. The client also reported early subscription traction four days after launch — Brenten told us the storefront launch drew 1,500 people and subscriptions stood at 201, against a year-end goal of 2,500 to 3,000 (the client’s own figures, reported verbally).

The relationship expanded twice inside a month. Five days after go-live, Zesty Snackz signed a monthly email and SMS retainer — proposing the scope themselves rather than being sold it — and approved a creator-program build.