Jamb

When Jamb and Hawker Antiques merged, they became the home of everything from 18th-century Irish fireplaces to six-figure antiques. They’re the names collectors and interior designers swear by. When they merged, they became the definitive home for everything from Irish chimneypieces to museum-grade decorative objects. When we first inherited the project, things were… tense. Two separate legacy PHP sites, 70+ duplicate meta descriptions, fractured SEO, and a custom CMS so fragile that adding a new category felt like cutting the wrong wire on a bomb. And because almost nothing they sell is “off the shelf,” their enquiry system needed the same level of craftsmanship as their fireplaces.

We jumped in alongside Toni Howarth and the benweaver.eu design team, knowing the stakes were sky-high. Tight budget, brittle tech, and two sites that needed to become one. Not a run-of-the-mill e-commerce website.

The first thing we did was ditch PHP. In the old system, adding a new furniture category or custom collection meant days of database work and the constant fear that one wrong move would take the entire site down. Because the CI/CD just wasn't there. It could very easily lead to broken pages you wouldn't know existed until somebody clicked into it.

We rebuilt Jamb’s platform on Sanity and Next.js. Sanity became the control centre for content, giving administrators a clean, reliable way to push updates without touching deployment pipelines or waiting on developers. Performance and delivery were baked in from day one. Live content updates mean the site feels dynamic while behaving like a static build. Build and production workflows were streamlined through Vercel CI, replacing fragile dynamic PHP with a setup that’s fast, predictable, and far easier to operate at scale.

The enquiry basket needed special care too. Nothing Jamb sells is “add to cart.” Every piece involves consultation, measurements, and founder-level expertise. So we designed a system that supports that bespoke process instead of forcing it into a standard eCommerce mould.

Merging two websites is a nightmare on its own. Doing it while Google is actively changing the rules makes it even worse. Between the October 2023 updates and the 2024–2025 push toward E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust), we watched a lot of sites quietly lose most of their traffic overnight.

That meant every redirect that we did mattered. We mapped every URL from both sites, cleaned up 70+ duplicate meta descriptions that were confusing search engines, and treated each redirect like it was carrying years of SEO equity on its back. Because it was.

We worked closely with the team to align content accuracy, language, and UX. This made sure the merged site didn’t just survive Google’s updates, but actually reflected the expertise and heritage that Google now actively rewards.

The old site was slow. Not “maybe optimise some images”, slow, but painfully slow. And when you’re selling luxury furniture, that’s basically handing business to competitors with a bow on top.

Rebuilding with Next.js, a Shopify backend, and shipping through Vercel’s edge network fixed that fast. Pages load instantly, navigation feels natural through preloading, and the whole site finally behaves as it should. And because it’s now running on modern infrastructure, Jamb can actually scale without fear. They can easily add thousands of products and roll out Shopify checkouts where it makes sense. The site no longer buckles under pressure like the old one did, which, frankly, is a massive relief.