Case Study
A bilingual food platform, rebuilt from a professional designer’s Illustrator files. 118 recipes, a digital ebook shop, and founders who manage everything themselves.
Cocoon Cooks had been running on Squarespace since around 2014. Rita and André wanted something fully custom, bilingual, and with e-commerce for ebooks. After a previous attempt with a digital agency that didn't work out, they asked me to step in. I rebuilt it from scratch, on my stack, and handed them something they could run entirely on their own.
Visit cocooncooks.com
120 hours
over 10 months
118 recipes, 512 URLs
1,000+ comments migrated
4,094 organic clicks
on a single recipe
Rita and André
manage everything in Sanity — independently
What we set out to build
Rebuild Cocoon Cooks from scratch with a fully custom design by Rita (graphic designer, co-founder), bilingual content management in Sanity CMS, and e-commerce for digital products. Migrate all existing recipes, articles, and 1,000+ comments from the old platform without losing anything.
Timeline: 120 hours over 10 months. Launched July 2025.
How the project unfolded
Rita is my sister. She and André have been running Cocoon Cooks since around 2014, first on Squarespace, building a bilingual food platform with recipes, articles, a newsletter, and over the years, brand partnerships with companies like The Body Shop, Auchan, and Kenwood. They’ve appeared on Portuguese TV. This isn’t a hobby blog.
When they decided to level up — custom design, ebooks, full bilingual CMS — they hired a digital agency. Twelve months later, there was a WordPress and Elementor backoffice that duplicated content across breakpoints, made bilingual editing painful, and was, to put it plainly, unusable. They asked me for help.
I agreed, but on one condition: my stack. Next.js, Sanity CMS, Vercel. They were skeptical at first. Recipe bloggers live in WordPress. The ecosystem, the plugins, the SEO tooling — it’s all there. I understood the hesitation. But I also knew what the Elementor backoffice had cost them, and I wasn’t going to hand them something they’d resent in a year.
When they saw the first drafts, they converted.
Rita had built complete mockups in Illustrator. Every screen, every state, custom illustrations, custom icons. It was my first time working with real professional design files rather than rough wireframes or vague briefs. More demanding than I expected. Also more satisfying. Pixel-perfect isn’t a phrase I use lightly, but that’s what it was.
The technical challenge that I’m most proud of is the comment migration. The old site had over 1,000 comments with ratings and forum-style threads. Comments are often the thing that gets quietly lost in a migration, written off as too complex. I built a migration script that pulled everything out and reproduced the structure in Sanity. Nothing was lost.
Launched July 2025. 512 URLs in the sitemap. Fully bilingual. The ebook shop live. Rita and André managing everything on their own.
What changed
Cocoon Cooks launched in July 2025. Since then, individual recipes are ranking for thousands of organic clicks, the ebook shop is live, and Rita and André manage the entire platform in Sanity without contacting a developer.
- Pixel-perfect implementation of a professional designer’s Illustrator files — custom illustrations, custom icons, zero visual compromise
- 1,000+ comments migrated programmatically with ratings and forum-style thread structure intact
- Arroz Basmati recipe: 4,094 organic clicks. Batatas a Murro: 4,047. 435 additional quick-win opportunities identified in Search Console.
- Digital ebook shop live (“Breakfasts That Stick”, €6.50) with 3 more ebooks in production
- Full CMS independence: Rita and André publish recipes, write articles, and manage the shop without developer involvement
The takeaway
What I learned
Working with Rita was different from any other project. She came with complete Illustrator files, not a vague idea. That changes everything: there’s no design negotiation, no iterating on direction, just the work of making the screen match the file. It’s demanding in a way I hadn’t experienced before. I also migrated a thousand comments and convinced two skeptical recipe bloggers to leave WordPress. I’m quietly proud of all three.
A platform rebuilt from scratch. A designer’s vision implemented exactly. A team that runs it without a developer.
Built with
Tech stack
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- Tailwind CSS
- Sanity
- Flodesk
- Vercel
You should be able to run your own platform.
I build sites that don’t need a developer in the loop to publish a recipe, update a product, or write an article. Let’s talk.