A Hyvä rebuild and multi-store estate for an Irish garden retailer.
OutdoorLiving.ie is an Irish family business selling garden furniture, garden buildings and outdoor living from its showroom at Glen of the Downs in County Wicklow and online across Ireland. After a poor experience with a previous agency it asked us to redesign and rebuild the store, which has since grown into a multi-store Magento estate on Hyvä.
OutdoorLiving.ie in numbers
- 1.4 sLargest Contentful Paint for real mobile visitors, passing all three Core Web VitalsChrome UX Report, mobile, 28 days to 31st October 2026
- 279garden buildings in one category hub, from gazebos to garden roomsLive store, read 31st October 2026
- 2storefronts, outdoorliving.ie and outdoorfurniture.ie, alongside the company’s brand domainsLive stores, read 31st October 2026
The brief.
OutdoorLiving.ie came to us after a disappointing experience with its previous ecommerce agency. The old store was cluttered and slow, and it did not do justice to a range that runs to hundreds of furniture sets and garden structures, much of it on show in the company’s own showroom.
The brief was a fast, clear store that lets a customer find a set, see it properly and then come and sit on it. We rebuilt the storefront on Hyvä, designed a navigation and landing structure for a range that keeps growing, and later built out the company’s other storefronts on the same platform.
What we built.
Four parts of the estate that do the selling, captured from the live store on 31st October 2026.
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Navigation designed around how people buy for the garden.
We designed the navigation from research into how customers browse outdoor furniture: departments first, from outdoor furniture and structures to artificial grass, barbecues and heaters, then sets by seat count, material and style. On a phone the same departments open as a list with an image for each, so a range that keeps growing stays easy to move through.
- Departments first, then sets by seats and material
- An image for every department on a phone
- Store locator and search in the header
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Category pages that work as small shops.
In place of ever-longer menus, each top-level category opens as a landing page of its own: subcategories as round photographs, a price range slider, stock filters and a finance promotion above the grid. Garden Buildings alone lists 279 products, from gazebos and awnings to garden rooms, offices and sheds, all one step from the hub.
- Subcategories as photographs
- Price slider and stock filter
- Promotions placed inside the hub
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Galleries that show the build quality.
Furniture and garden structures are bought on detail, so every product carries an expansive gallery of large photography: the piece in a garden, the materials up close, the structure from more than one side. On a phone the gallery becomes a swipeable carousel with thumbnails beneath, and the product name and key badges follow straight after.
- Large photography, several angles per product
- Swipeable gallery with thumbnails on a phone
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From the screen to the showroom.
Customers often called to ask where they could see a piece and what each location stocked, so we built a store locator into the Hyvä store. Each showroom has its own map, its details and a link straight into Maps, with a plain note of what it carries: today the main furniture showroom at Glen of the Downs in County Wicklow, and Dunboyne in County Meath, which stocks no outdoor furniture.
- A map for every showroom
- What each location stocks, said plainly
Measured on real customers' devices.
Not a lab score: these are the speeds real customers get, collected by Chrome from their own phones and laptops.
Passes Core Web Vitals on mobile
Core Web Vitals, real-user data (Chrome UX Report), mobile, 28 days to 31st October 2026. 75th percentile of real Chrome visits to the store's homepage, read in PageSpeed Insights.
After having a number of bad experiences with 3rd party developers for Magento we decided to go with Rowan for our last site redesign and upgrade. This has turned out to be a very good decision … We no longer feel like we are in perpetual development. We are growing and improving and Rowan has been key to this success.
The stack.
What the store is built on, and what each part does for the business.
- Magento 2 The commerce platform, run as a multi-store estate.
- Hyvä The storefront theme on every store in the estate.
- Klarna Pay-later finance, promoted on the category hubs.
The work, area by area.
The work on this estate, by area.
A supported release
The estate kept on a supported Magento release, with Adobe security releases deployed as they are published and the next upgrade planned ahead of each support date.
Conversion and speed
Category hubs, galleries and product pages refined against how customers actually shop, with speed followed on real-customer data.
Development and support
Features, fixes and content tooling for the team, built and tested on staging before they go live.
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- Magento Open Source, Adobe Commerce and Mage-OS stores
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- Written by a person, not a scanner
- Platform
- Magento Open Source 2.4.4-p3
- Adobe support
- ended 12th April 2025
- PHP
- 8.1, end of life 31st Dec 2025
- Frontend
- Luma
- Security headers
- 2 of 6 present
- Hijack indicators
- none found
What we would do first. Apply the outstanding security fixes, then plan the upgrade to a supported release.
