How Fast Growing Trees’ VP of engineering branched out with a migration to Hydrogen

Fast Growing Trees is all about growth—for their plants and their technology. So when the engineering team of this online nursery needed a more flexible, more powerful ecommerce backend, they took on a massive transformation. They rebuilt their site with Hydrogen.

Migration can be a daunting task for any engineering team. Fast Growing Trees didn’t want to disrupt the user experience, impact their search engine visibility, or strain their limited resourcing.

Fast Growing Trees has come a long way since its founding nearly 19 years ago, starting with the sale of just one tree. Today, the brand is the world’s largest online nursery, serving over 2 million customers. In their busy season, a single fulfillment center can process over 25,000 plants in a single day.

Jordan Guggenheim, Fast Growing Trees’ VP of engineering chatted with Ben Sehl, senior product lead at Shopify, to discuss their migration journey to a headless ecommerce framework.

“Our development speed has doubled, and we're delivering more complicated features that have less regressions. It allows us to focus on the fun stuff, which is building product,” says Jordan.

So with a lean team of just three engineers, Fast Growing Trees launched their new site in November 2023 after months of planning, testing, and development. Since the launch, their development speed has skyrocketed, and the customer experience has improved with accessible, user-friendly features.

Watch this convo to learn how Fast Growing Trees:

• Doubled their development speed with a headless ecommerce framework.
• Navigated a smooth migration process in record time with a small team.
• Balanced speed and performance while delivering a better experience to customers.