A custom stack that powered growth, then started to slow it down
Harry’s built its original custom ecommerce platform to support a subscription-first experience and their brand ethos to care deeply about the details. That in-house system delivered for a long time. Over time, it also became harder to maintain and more expensive to evolve. That’s when they sought out Domaine to help them migrate them onto a headless Shopify site.
In the webinar, Suji Strain-Kokich, Senior Product Manager at Harry’s, describes the turning point clearly: even simple changes or experiments could take weeks of engineering effort. That pace made it difficult to iterate as quickly as the business wanted.
At the same time, Harry’s expanded across multiple brands and markets. Beyond needing a new site, Harry’s required a more scalable, maintainable foundation and a clearer way to standardize how teams build, launch, and operate ecommerce across regions.
In Domaine Migrations Vol 03, we bring together:
- Matt Jardine, Account Manager at Domaine (host)
- Suji Strain-Kokich, Senior Product Manager at Harry’s
- Lindy Crea, VP of Partnerships & Solutions at Recharge
- Max Rolon, CTO at Domaine
This recap highlights the story, goals, and high-level strategy. The full webinar is available on demand and goes deeper into the technical decisions, collaboration model, and the tradeoffs that show up when you migrate a complex subscription business to Shopify.
The goals: preserve the customer experience & change the operating model
From day one, Harry’s set a important bar to meet: customers shouldn’t feel the migration.
Customer experience (CX) goals
At the beginning of the migration, Harry’s prioritized feature parity and continuity. The team aimed to lift and shift the existing experience so customers could keep doing what they already knew how to do, including subscription flows, bundles, and starter kits.
Key priorities included:
- Minimal disruption during the transition
- Mobile optimization and performance
- A smooth checkout experience
- Preserving familiar subscription behavior and merchandising flows
Operational goals
On the operational side, the team had a deadline. Harry’s planned a major product launch in 2025 and needed the platform migration complete ahead of time.
They also wanted the migration to unlock long-term efficiency across a multi-brand, multi-region portfolio:
- Standardize the ecommerce stack across brands and regions
- Reduce ongoing maintenance and simplify operations
- Give brand and marketing teams more autonomy to manage content and launch campaigns
- Build a foundation that supports new feature development and international growth
Max summarizes the real work behind the headline: moving from an in-house system to a modern ecosystem is a transformation initiative. It takes tight alignment across teams, a clear definition of responsibilities, and a plan that balances ambition with pragmatic scope.
Why Shopify & why headless
Harry’s didn’t choose Shopify in a vacuum. The decision came from internal signals and external validation. Internally, other brands in the Harry’s portfolio had already migrated to Shopify and shared consistently positive feedback. Externally, Harry’s CTO spoke with leaders at other consumer brands running Shopify and learned where it excels and where you need to architect thoughtfully.
That helped the team make two decisions in parallel:
- Shopify provides the ecosystem and innovation cadence Harry’s wanted
- Headless made sense for the flexibility Harry’s needed in a subscription-first experience
In the webinar, Max walks through Domaine’s early architectural evaluation: headless vs. headed, then Hydrogen vs. alternatives. With our guidance, Harry’s chose the headless approach with Hydrogen (Shopify’s React framework built on Remix), hosted on Oxygen to stay aligned with Shopify’s roadmap and performance model.
Harry’s understood what headless would require. The team had the technical maturity to take advantage of the flexibility without treating headless as a default choice.
Recharge as the subscription foundation
A Shopify migration is never “just Shopify” for a subscription-first business. Subscriptions sit at the core of Harry’s customer relationship, and the team needed a platform that could support complex logic without rebuilding every mechanism from scratch.
Harry’s ran a formal evaluation process for subscription tooling and selected Recharge based on:
- Fit against a detailed feature set for a complex subscription model
- Support during migration and implementation
- Strong alignment with Shopify’s roadmap, including checkout extensibility
- Confidence in APIs and extensibility for custom business logic
Lindy frames Recharge’s role simply: Harry’s already knew how to build a great subscription experience. Recharge helped bring that complexity to Shopify in a way that preserved flexibility and reduced long-term technical overhead.
Re-architecting multi-region commerce with “build once, deploy everywhere”
Harry’s operates across multiple regions, and the migration needed to reduce complexity rather than replicate it. The team chose a “build once, deploy everywhere” approach, grounded in three decisions:
1. A mono-repository (monorepo) and a single codebase
Harry’s adopted a monorepo to centralize storefront code across their markets. This structure reduces coordination overhead, supports reuse, and keeps development and QA more consistent.
2. Shopify’s preferred headless stack
The team built the storefront with Hydrogen and hosted on Oxygen to benefit from Shopify’s performance and platform support.
3. Autonomy where it matters
Even with a unified codebase, global teams still need control over localized content and campaigns. Harry’s used Sanity as the CMS, to let regional teams manage content with guardrails, without requiring engineering support for every update.
Max describes the balancing act well: consolidate the right things, then preserve autonomy where regions need to operate differently.
The hardest part: migrating subscribers without disruption
For those who have lived through a subscription migration, they know where the risk sits: active subscribers, billing cadences, order history, and customer expectations.
Harry’s migrated more than a decade of subscriber history into Shopify and Recharge while protecting continuity of service. Suji calls this out as one of the most complex parts of the project. The team:
- Owned the data migration workstream internally
- Mapped legacy data and billing cadences carefully
- Ran multiple dry runs to validate outcomes before cutover
- Coordinated closely with Recharge and Domaine on edge cases and validation
On top of data complexity, the team hit platform-level challenges that required thoughtful solutions. Suji points to areas like multi-line item subscription behavior and discount stacking. The Domaine and Harry’s teams leaned on Recharge APIs, custom logic, and structured triage to preserve business-critical flows like trial kits, bundles, and promotions.
Domaine’s approach started with a robust discovery phase to surface scope gaps early. The project also required a tighter governance model than a typical agency engagement, since Harry’s embedded engineers co-developed alongside Domaine. Max highlights practices like daily standups, shared documentation, automated code checks, and TypeScript standards as tools that helped teams move quickly without losing control.
Crucial features to keep, and how the new stack supports them
Some ecommerce features are “nice to have.” For Harry’s, their starter kits and the Mystery Item features are core to their brand and business, and influence acquisition, retention, and brand voice.
Starter kits
Starter kits support low-commitment trial and a smooth transition into subscription. The flow needed to preserve intro pricing, conversion logic, and the way offers show up across the funnel.
In the webinar, Suji explains that the starter kit flow required custom integration with Recharge subscription tools and custom discount logic so marketing teams can run dynamic offers without heavy engineering lift.
The Mystery Item
The Mystery Item plays multiple roles:
- Adds surprise and delight that matches Harry’s brand voice
- Drives product discovery
- Delivers meaningful revenue impact, with a large share of purchases coming from existing subscribers
Harry’s treated this experience as non-negotiable. The Domaine team rebuilt it with custom serverless infrastructure and Checkout UI Extensions to support dynamic selection and personalized presentation in checkout.
Max adds more detail in the session on what it takes to make this work across acquisition and subscription contexts, including event handling and infrastructure practices that keep the system scalable and maintainable.
Rebuilding the subscription box experience on Recharge
Harry’s didn’t treat subscriptions as per product replenishment. The subscription box experience includes product selection, cadence flexibility, and business-specific logic that customers already knew.
To bridge the legacy experience into the new stack, the team leveraged Recharge to support:
- Trial-to-subscription conversion flows
- Flexible cadence and item management
- Custom bundles and post-purchase logic
- A branded experience layered on top of Recharge’s Shopify integration
Lindy describes the collaboration as the differentiator: Recharge brings strong out-of-the-box subscription capabilities, and the Domaine and Harry’s teams pushed further through APIs to meet the brand’s bar for personalization and control.
Max also touches on key technical choices that protected continuity, including using classic accounts and Shopify Multipass to maintain a seamless login experience that preserved existing sign-in behavior.
Early results: faster launches, lower overhead, minimal disruption
A few months after launch, Harry’s saw early wins that map directly back to the migration goals. Suji highlights:
- Greater flexibility to run large campaigns with minimal engineering involvement
- Faster merchandising and promotional changes through operational adjustments
- Successful execution of major brand moments, including a brand refresh across regions
- A major product launch that exceeded its first-month forecast within one day
- Reduced time spent on maintenance and more focus on strategic feature work
- Minimal customer disruption, with low contact volume after launch
The part that stands out is what changed for the team’s day-to-day work. Marketing and brand teams can move more independently. Engineers spend more time building differentiated features instead of supporting a bespoke system that only a few people fully understood.
What Harry’s can do next, and why the foundation matters
The migration didn’t just move a site. It changed what the organization can realistically take on next.
Harry’s called out several areas that become more achievable on the new foundation:
- Faster partner integrations that would have taken months on a custom stack
- Easier experimentation and iteration across subscription experiences
- New ways to support product discovery, including exploration of AI-driven experiences
- A development experience that engineers enjoy more, which matters when you want to keep moving fast
Max frames it as a balance: the team achieved flexibility without returning to the same complexity trap that comes with maintaining a fully bespoke platform over time.
