HBX

hbx.com is the online store of HYPEBEAST — a curated, multi-brand destination for menswear, womenswear and lifestyle, shipping to over 80 markets worldwide.

It opened in 2012 as a fairly straightforward shop for the labels the editorial team was already writing about. The original build was WordPress with WooCommerce handling the catalogue, which was exactly the right call at the size it started out at.

That held up until it didn't. As the catalogue grew and new product landed almost every day, WordPress became the wrong shape for the job — pages got slower, and the site struggled to handle the volume of data we were pushing through it. So we replatformed the store onto Sylius, which is built on Symfony. What you see today is a long way past a clothes-and-shoes shop: alongside Men and Women there are verticals for Life, Golf and Archives — the second-hand and vintage side of things.

I've worked on it as a senior web developer, based in Hong Kong, for a good while now — long enough to have seen it through more than one full replatform. It's the piece of work on this site I'd point at first if anyone asked me what I've actually learned.