We rebuilt the entire website.
No client noticed.
Quintessentially Travel asked us to replatform their site after the previous CMS was deprecated. The remit was clean: rebuild every backend system, and keep the visible product so close to the original that existing members would never notice the work. We did it.
60
Offices worldwide
25 yrs
Operating since 2000
0%
Visible change for clients
100%
Backend rebuilt
About the client
The lifestyle management firm that wrote the category
Quintessentially Group is the British lifestyle management company founded in 2000 by Aaron Simpson, Ben Elliot and Paul Drummond. Headquartered in London, with 60 offices on the ground around the world, the firm built the modern concierge industry around a single idea: one-to-one access for clients who can call any time, anywhere, for anything.
Quintessentially Travel is the travel arm. Bespoke itineraries, suite reservations, private aviation, restaurants that do not take reservations, openings that do not exist publicly. The site is the front door for that promise, which is why the rebuild had to be invisible.
The brief
Replatform without breaking the promise
The existing CMS had reached end of life. The vendor had stopped shipping security updates, the integrations were drifting, and the engineering cost of carrying it forward was rising every quarter. Replatform-or-rust was the situation, and there is only one right answer to that.
The constraint made the rebuild interesting. Existing members must not see a change. Bookmarks must keep working. The booking journey must feel identical. The editorial team must be able to log in on day one and operate without retraining. The work all happens under the floorboards.
What we rebuilt
01
A pixel-matched front end
Every header, every spacing token, every hover state matched against the live site. Visual regression testing on the headline templates so the cutover felt like a refresh, not a relaunch.
02
A new content management system
Replacement of the deprecated CMS with a modern, maintainable platform. Editorial team kept the workflows they knew, on a stack that will be supported for the next decade.
03
A backend rebuilt from scratch
The whole back end re-engineered: data models, API surfaces, scheduled jobs, third-party integrations. Built on a stack the team can actually hire for.
04
Content and media migration
Years of editorial, imagery and itineraries moved across with URL parity preserved. Existing links kept working, existing SEO kept its rankings, no broken member bookmarks.
05
Integrations preserved
Booking systems, CRM, reservations, the rest of the Quintessentially stack. Every external dependency rewired without an outage.
06
A deployment pipeline
Branching, staging environments, CI checks, automated visual diffs against production. The engineering team inherited a workflow they can extend without us in the room.
How we did it
Five phases. One quiet-hours cutover. Sub-minute visible downtime.
- 01
Parallel running
New stack stood up alongside the old, populated with real data through the migration pipeline. Both ran in lock-step for the cutover window, so any regression was caught against a known good baseline.
- 02
Visual regression as a gate
Every template snapshotted at every breakpoint, diffed against the production site. Anything more than a one-pixel delta on critical pages was a blocking issue. No exceptions.
- 03
Phased content migration
Editorial, members and reservations moved in waves, each with a verification pass before the next started. The data team and the editorial team had a single source of truth at every stage.
- 04
Quiet-hours cutover
DNS flipped in a quiet window, monitoring on every endpoint, on-call team awake. The visible downtime was sub-minute. The invisible work had taken months.
- 05
Hand-over and steady state
Documentation, runbooks, training for the Quintessentially Travel team. We left them with a stack they can operate without us in the room, and with us on call when they want us in it.
The result
A site that feels exactly the same, on a stack the team owns
Quintessentially Travel is live on the new platform. The editorial team kept their login. The booking journey behaves the way clients remember. The backend is now a modern, maintainable system the engineering team can extend, monitor and hire for. The replatform was delivered cleanly, on schedule.
The best compliment is silence. The members did not write in to ask what had changed. That is the measure of a successful CMS migration.
How we approached it
01
Replatforming is a craft, not a feature
When the existing CMS is being deprecated, the choice is rebuild or rust. We treat the replatform as the whole product, not a port. Same surface, different machine, every screw double-checked.
02
Pixel-perfect is a constraint, not a style
When the brief is do not change anything visible, the temptation is to second-guess the existing design. We do not. The brief wins. The team built designs that match to the pixel and stopped there.
03
Members never feel the engineering
A high-net-worth member should not have to learn anything new. The bookmark works. The login flows. The screen looks the same. The product they pay for is unchanged. Underneath, the platform is unrecognisable.
04
A clean stack pays dividends for years
The new system is one the editorial team and the engineering team can iterate on for the next decade. Easier to hire for, easier to update, easier to monitor. The investment compounds long after the rebuild is in production.
Considering a replatform?
Old CMS dying? We have done this before.
If your existing CMS is deprecated, end-of-life, or simply becoming a tax on your engineering team, we can take it off your plate. Pixel-perfect rebuild, backend re-engineered, content migrated, integrations preserved. Tell us what you are running and where you want to land.
- A site that looks identical, on a stack you can actually maintain
- Visual regression testing on every page, every breakpoint
- Parallel running and a quiet-hours cutover, sub-minute downtime
- Editorial team trained, runbooks handed over, monitoring in place