Decoupling content from code to build a high-performance art website

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"Janne is far more than a hired gun. He’s even more than a teammate. Working with Janne feels like working with a true partner who deeply understands not only what you’re trying to achieve, but why. He brings a high level of creativity and innovation to solving any problem.

I’m even more impressed by Janne’s ability to translate those big ideas into beautifully simple and highly effective solutions. He can design, he can code, he can do it all!"

Wright Harvey

Founder, Sugarlift

Summary

Client

Sugarlift

NYC, USA

My role

Principal Designer

Full-Stack Engineer

Tech stack

Challenge

Transforming a bloated marketplace into a high-performance directory while maintaining the client's existing Airtable-based inventory workflow.

Outcome

Lightning-fast user experience that successfully repositioned Sugarlift as a premium art advisory, while giving the client total autonomy over their massive data set.

Visit

sugarlift.com

Sugarlift was trapped in a bloated marketplace architecture that no longer served their business model.

The company faced a fundamental shift in its business model. Their legacy platform was architected as a transactional marketplace, but the company's evolution required a more sophisticated, curated directory of artists, artworks and exhibitions. The existing site was visually dated and suffered from performance bottlenecks that directly impacted their search engine visibility.

Modernizing the stack while keeping the client's Source of Truth intact

The technical requirement was to modernize the stack while maintaining the client's existing workflow. The team managed their entire inventory within Airtable and needed to keep that process. To solve this, I designed a headless architecture that decoupled content management from the frontend. By utilizing Next.js for static generation, I ensured the frontend remained lightweight while enabling fast, server-side filtering via Supabase.

Building a custom bridge to automate a manual migration mess

Since direct API calls to Airtable can be slow, I built a custom admin interface to manage the data flow. This dashboard provided a one-click migration trigger, allowing the client to sync thousands of records from Airtable to Supabase independently. I also engineered a background process to migrate high-resolution images to Supabase Storage, optimizing them for web delivery to ensure visual quality without compromising load times.

Delivering a perfect performance score and total operational autonomy

By removing the overhead of the legacy marketplace logic and implementing a modern stack, we transformed a technical bottleneck into a strategic advantage. The result is a lightning-fast user experience that successfully repositioned Sugarlift as a premium art advisory, while giving the client total autonomy over their massive data set.

Revolutionizing art consulting through internal AI tools

Our partnership continues today as we develop internal tools that utilize AI to revolutionize the art consulting process. By leveraging large language models and proprietary data, we are building systems that allows consultants to match artists and artworks with client spaces with unprecedented speed and precision.