Daily Harvest launched in 2015 with a clear mission: make it easier for people to eat sustainably grown, organic fruits and vegetables every day. The brand built one of the earlier direct-to-consumer frozen food models, which meant operating with a set of technical requirements that many platforms didn't support at the time.
Over the years, that early custom foundation delivered what the business needed. It also created a familiar reality for established ecommerce teams: as the site, data, and internal systems grew more complex, the cost of maintaining and evolving the platform grew with it. Roadmaps became harder to predict. Simple improvements could turn into long engineering projects. Teams spent more time managing complexity and less time building the next customer experience.
In Volume 02 of our migrations webinar with Daily Harvest, Domaine’s Co-founder & CRO Mac King sits down with:
- YuJin Yong, VP of Digital at Daily Harvest
- Jake Cohen, VP of Shopify at Klaviyo
- Carla Wright, Sr. Enterprise Architect at Shopify
Together, they walk through why Daily Harvest migrated from a homegrown legacy platform to Shopify, what it took to move nearly eight years of data, and how the team used Shopify and Klaviyo to create a more unified, self-serve operating model.
Learn more about replatforming in our Platform Migrations Hub.
This recap highlights the story, goals, and high-level strategy. The full webinar is available on demand and goes deeper into the tradeoffs, decisions, and practical realities that show up when an enterprise brand modernizes its stack.
When “cutting edge” becomes a constraint
Daily Harvest’s legacy site made sense in 2015. At that point, the brand needed to support a subscription-driven journey that many tools couldn't handle well out of the box.
Over time, the same custom foundation introduced pain that many teams recognize:
- High effort required to ship updates and test ideas
- A heavy set of internal systems to manage and maintain
- Limited predictability in roadmaps and cycle times
- Increasing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) as complexity expanded
- Ongoing risk mitigation as fixes created new issues elsewhere
YuJin describes the moment of clarity simply:
“We needed to move platforms to operate at a speed that felt normal compared to what we saw other brands achieve.”
Evaluate whether to migrate off a custom ecommerce platform with our Custom to Shopify Enterprise Migration Guide.
The decision to replatform: profitability, speed, & predictability
Daily Harvest approached the migration as a business decision first. The goals centered on reducing bottom-line expenses, increasing cycle time, and modernizing the digital experience without taking on unnecessary risk.
The motivations spanned both internal operations and customer-facing experience:
Internal drivers
- Reduce the cost and operational load of maintaining a custom platform
- Enable merchandising and marketing teams to move without heavy developer involvement
- Improve reliability and reduce “whack-a-mole” fixes across interconnected systems
- Simplify an extremely complex tech stack into a clearer set of anchor platforms
Customer experience drivers
- Deliver faster site performance and a more modern UX/UI
- Support multiple purchase journeys, including subscription and non-subscription customers
- Add flexible merchandising capabilities, including bundles
- Keep room for growth across additional channels and marketplaces
The part that stands out in the conversation is how clearly the team framed the migration as an investment. According to YuJin,
“We migrated to build a foundation that supports faster learning, better coordination, and a roadmap that moves beyond maintenance.”
Headless vs. Liquid: why Daily Harvest chose Liquid
Many enterprise teams assume that moving from custom means choosing headless. Daily Harvest had already started down that path, and it initially felt familiar because it mirrored their legacy approach.
Then the team paused and Domaine helped them evaluate what they actually needed to deliver.
YuJin shares the pivot:
"The roadmap didn't require headless complexity. With Domaine’s guidance, we realized a Liquid build could support the experiences we cared about, while helping us move faster and take advantage of platform improvements as Shopify ships them."
Key reasons Daily Harvest chose Liquid:
- Faster execution with fewer open-ended build decisions
- Better alignment with app ecosystem releases that often land on Liquid first
- A simpler path to reducing complexity while still supporting customization
- Confidence that UX/UI goals would hold without headless overhead
In the webinar, the panel unpacks a point that doesn’t get enough attention: headless can be the right choice, but it comes with ownership. If the business goal is speed and simplification, a simpler architecture can be the more strategic option.
A unified stack: Shopify & Klaviyo as anchor platforms
Daily Harvest frames Shopify and Klaviyo as the two anchor systems for commerce and customer communication. That clarity shaped how the team evaluated tools, integrations, and workflows.
On the Klaviyo side, the team revamped CRM and email alongside the site redesign, then expanded into additional products:
- SMS (with a renewed focus on opt-ins and strategy)
- Klaviyo Product Reviews, including a migration of more than seven years of review history
YuJin describes a practical selection rule that many teams aspire to:
“If a tool doesn't integrate cleanly with Shopify and Klaviyo, it may not support the speed we want.”
The panel also touches on a shift that matters for large teams: the day-to-day work moves closer to the people who own the outcome. Instead of routing segmentation and sends through engineering and multiple data stakeholders, marketers can build segments, launch campaigns, and learn faster – creating a change that isn’t just a tooling upgrade, but an operating model upgrade.
Migration as transformation: deciding what to carry forward
When you migrate off a legacy platform, the hardest problems often show up before any code ships.
For Daily Harvest the challenge was determining what, of nearly eight years of data, logic, tags, and historical decisions embedded in the business should be carried forward, and what should be left behind.
The team had to answer questions like:
- Which customer experiences are truly essential today?
- Which journeys should be rebuilt, and which should be redesigned?
- Which data is still useful for personalization, segmentation, and reporting?
- Which historical artifacts are no longer worth carrying forward?
YuJin’s advice in the webinar is worth sitting with: treat the migration as an opportunity to ask, “If we were building this company today, what would matter most?” That framing helps teams avoid rebuilding the past by default.
Discover more by listening to the full webinar to understand the nuance of how Daily Harvest approached tradeoffs, internal alignment, and the reality that not everything maps one-to-one from custom to a standard platform.
Bundles without engineering: a practical example of self-serve merchandising
In this webinar, Bundles came up repeatedly – and for good reason. Daily Harvest’s catalog is built around individual SKUs, and bundles create a different shopping journey without changing how operations need to fulfill orders.
On the legacy site, bundles required meaningful engineering effort. Whereas, on Shopify, Daily Harvest uses Shopify’s native bundles capability so merchandising and marketing teams can build, test, and iterate without developer dependencies, enabling:
- Merchandising to create new bundles directly in Shopify
- Teams to launch seasonal and segment-specific boxes quickly
- Operations to fulfill bundles as individual items, matching warehouse needs
- Inventory to stay aligned to individual SKUs, reducing oversell risk
The panel goes deeper into why this matters for both speed and operational clarity.
Faster learning, fewer stakeholders, & better coordination
The strongest thread throughout the webinar is pace. Daily Harvest describes a shift away from long timelines and heavy dependencies toward faster iteration, clearer ownership, and more connected systems. With Shopify, and Domaine as their partner, Daily Harvest are able to:
- Build in a more consistent sprint cadence with Domaine
- React faster to seasonal opportunities and inventory changes
- Use “notify me” signals to understand demand when items go out of stock
- Rely less on heavyweight testing infrastructure because the team can ship and learn quickly
- Support a web view mobile app more seamlessly by building once and extending the experience
In the webinar, the panel also emphasizes something that’s easy to miss: unified commerce is not just tech. It’s also the experience of working across partners as one team, with fewer “handoffs” and less time lost translating context between systems.
What Daily Harvest is bringing back next
A smart migration prioritizes what you need at launch and phases the rest with intention.
Daily Harvest de-risked certain features and content during the migration, with plans to reintroduce them thoughtfully. YuJin points to upcoming work such as:
- Gifting capabilities
- Gift cards, reintroduced in a safer phase rather than during the core migration
- Blog and content experiences, including recipes and brand storytelling
- A review of older content to decide what still supports the brand today
This is where the full webinar is especially useful: brands get a clearer view of how the team chose what to launch, what to defer, and how they think about sequencing in a way that protects both customer experience and internal velocity.
Watch the full webinar on demand
If you’re evaluating a migration from custom commerce to Shopify, or you’re trying to simplify a complex stack without losing the experiences that make your brand distinct, this webinar will give you a grounded view of what the process can look like.
You’ll hear how Daily Harvest approached:
- The platform decision and architectural tradeoffs
- Data migration and “what to keep” strategy
- Unified workflows across Shopify, Klaviyo, and the partner ecosystem
- Real examples of how self-serve tooling changes speed, ownership, and output
