Third Shot Supply Co.: one Magento 2.4.9 catalog, two live storefronts

Context

Most of my Magento work lives behind client logins and NDAs. Third Shot Supply Co. is a fictional pickleball gear brand I put on my own domain so anyone can see the kind of Magento 2 build I lead, end to end, without a login. The same store runs two front ends side by side: the classic Magento theme at m2.michael-kuhlman.com and a headless one at headless.michael-kuhlman.com.

The challenge

Make it a real store, not a theme screenshot: a current Magento release in production mode, a catalog that uses every product type, a checkout that completes, and a front end that is fast and comfortable on a phone. Then build a headless front end on the same catalog, so the two approaches can be compared on the same products.

What I did

I built it with Claude Code as an example of AI-accelerated delivery: I designed the theme, the custom modules and the data model, used Claude Code to write the code faster, and reviewed every change and checked it in a browser before it went live.

• Platform. Magento Open Source 2.4.9 (the Mage-OS 3.5 distribution) on PHP 8.3, MariaDB 10.11, OpenSearch 2.19 and Redis full-page cache, in production mode.
• Theme. A custom Luma child theme: header and navigation, category pages with layered navigation, product pages with swatches, cart and checkout, all checked from phone to desktop widths.
• Catalog as code. A seeder module builds the whole catalog from source files: simple, configurable (color and grip-size swatches), bundle and grouped products, related and cross-sell links, reviews and CMS pages, so the store can be rebuilt from scratch in one command.
• Shopping UX. A custom module adds AJAX layered navigation, infinite scroll and live search.
• Performance. A custom module serves responsive WebP images and critical CSS so the first screen paints fast on mobile.
• Headless storefront. A second front end in Next.js 16 (App Router, TypeScript) that reads the same catalog through Magento's GraphQL API: same products, same URLs, cart, checkout and customer accounts. Pages are prerendered and served from Cloudflare's edge; a small Magento module tells the storefront to refresh a page when a product, category or CMS page is saved.
• Git discipline. Every change is a Git commit in a private repository, with pre-commit checks for secrets, PHP syntax and Magento XML.

Outcome

Both storefronts are live and open to anyone: browse the catalog, filter, search and place a test order with the "Check / Money order" method (nothing ships, nothing is charged). Open the same product on each to compare a classic Magento theme with a headless build.