Before / After · Case Study

Porto Verde — a parked domain to a B2B cannabis-lab operating surface (plus a zero-downtime domain migration)

Extraction & Processing

Porto Verde is a licensed Long Beach micro-processor and co-packer — extraction, co-pack, packaging, and METRC-compliant labeling for cannabis and hemp brands. It had no web presence: the domain sat on a registrar parking page and buyers found the lab by referral. Built from scratch on Next.js 15 — a facility hero shot on the real C1D1 floor, nine service deep-dives, an equipment-transparency page that names the actual CTM and FlexPackPRO machines, a compliance surface (21+ gate, METRC, Prop 65, COA positioning), and a quote funnel with drag-and-drop artwork upload — then shipped to production the same day. When the owner realized the domain was misspelled and bought the correct one, the entire stack — site, DNS, self-hosted email, SES, env — migrated to it with zero downtime, and the typo domain was left as a path-preserving redirect.

“The lab made the product for years — it just had no front door. Now it has one, and it never claims a spec it can't back.”

portoverdelab.com↗Repo → og-gitclaw/portoverde↗

🔒portoverdelab.com

🔒portoverdelab.com · parked

Before

Receipts — measured

Numbers that moved.

Pages shipped (parked page → operating surface)

was 0

Service deep-dives (extraction + co-pack)

was 0

Live systems migrated to the correct domain (zero downtime)

was 0

Domain-aligned mailboxes provisioned (Stalwart + SES)

was 0

Registrar parked page → full Next.js 15 operating surface, live same day
0 → 9 service deep-dives (distillate, resin, diamonds, THCA + 5 co-pack lines)
Quote funnel with drag-drop artwork upload (PDF/AI/PSD, up to 100 MB)
One-letter domain typo → 8 live systems migrated, zero downtime, old domain 308-redirects

The pixel diff

Overview, then the walkthrough.

Left: everything the legacy site shipped — frozen in place. Right: an auto-scrolling tour of the rebuild, from hero to booking. No slider to fight with.

The four beats

Problem · Insight · Build · Outcome.

Scroll past the legacy frame. The four beats land in order. At the end, the modern site fades into the same window.

🔒portoverdelab.com · parked

🔒portoverdelab.com

01 · Problem
A real lab, invisible online.
Porto Verde has been extracting, co-packing, and labeling for cannabis and hemp brands out of a licensed Long Beach facility — but the domain sat on a registrar parking page topped with sponsored-search spam, and the only way to reach the lab was a referral or a phone number. A capable manufacturer with no front door, in a saturated 2026 market where buyers vet partners online first.
02 · Insight
Procurement buys on proof — so show the floor, the machines, and the compliance.
Brand owners and procurement teams don't need a brochure; they need capability scope, the actual equipment, a compliance story, and a way to send a brief with artwork. Build an operating surface around that — nine service deep-dives, an equipment-transparency page, a compliance surface, and an artwork-upload quote funnel — and never claim a spec the lab can't back.
03 · Build
Parked domain to production in a day.
Next.js 15 + Tailwind v4 on Vercel: a facility hero, nine service pages, packaging (Mylar + glass), an equipment page naming CTM + FlexPackPRO, a compliance surface (21+ gate, METRC, Prop 65, COA positioning), and a presigned-upload quote funnel backed by Neon — fronted by GoDaddy DNS pointed at Vercel's edge (global CDN, automatic SSL). The positioning was corrected end-to-end so the site reads as a processor/co-packer, never a cultivator.
04 · Outcome
Live — premium, accurate, and honest.
The lab finally has a front door: a fast, industrial-premium B2B surface that turns referral traffic into scoped, artwork-attached quote requests, shows the real floor and the real machines, and flags every unverified number instead of faking it. The receipts the partner still needs to confirm — DCC license, realized throughput, brand case studies — are marked TBC in the UI, ready to flip the moment they land.
05 · Postscript
Bought the correctly-spelled domain after launch — migrated everything, lost nothing.
The site shipped on the misspelled portAverdelab.com before anyone clocked it. When the owner bought the correct portOverdelab.com, the full stack moved over in one session — code, DNS, Vercel, self-hosted Stalwart email + four mailboxes, AWS SES + DKIM, every env var — verified live with zero downtime, the old domain wiped from the mail server and re-pointed as a path-preserving 308 redirect. The kind of cleanup that usually means a weekend of broken links and bounced mail; here it was a single afternoon, end to end.

🔒portoverdelab.com · parked

01 · Problem

A real lab, invisible online.

Porto Verde has been extracting, co-packing, and labeling for cannabis and hemp brands out of a licensed Long Beach facility — but the domain sat on a registrar parking page topped with sponsored-search spam, and the only way to reach the lab was a referral or a phone number. A capable manufacturer with no front door, in a saturated 2026 market where buyers vet partners online first.

02 · Insight

Procurement buys on proof — so show the floor, the machines, and the compliance.

Brand owners and procurement teams don't need a brochure; they need capability scope, the actual equipment, a compliance story, and a way to send a brief with artwork. Build an operating surface around that — nine service deep-dives, an equipment-transparency page, a compliance surface, and an artwork-upload quote funnel — and never claim a spec the lab can't back.

03 · Build

Parked domain to production in a day.

Next.js 15 + Tailwind v4 on Vercel: a facility hero, nine service pages, packaging (Mylar + glass), an equipment page naming CTM + FlexPackPRO, a compliance surface (21+ gate, METRC, Prop 65, COA positioning), and a presigned-upload quote funnel backed by Neon — fronted by GoDaddy DNS pointed at Vercel's edge (global CDN, automatic SSL). The positioning was corrected end-to-end so the site reads as a processor/co-packer, never a cultivator.

04 · Outcome

Live — premium, accurate, and honest.

The lab finally has a front door: a fast, industrial-premium B2B surface that turns referral traffic into scoped, artwork-attached quote requests, shows the real floor and the real machines, and flags every unverified number instead of faking it. The receipts the partner still needs to confirm — DCC license, realized throughput, brand case studies — are marked TBC in the UI, ready to flip the moment they land.

05 · Postscript

Bought the correctly-spelled domain after launch — migrated everything, lost nothing.

The site shipped on the misspelled portAverdelab.com before anyone clocked it. When the owner bought the correct portOverdelab.com, the full stack moved over in one session — code, DNS, Vercel, self-hosted Stalwart email + four mailboxes, AWS SES + DKIM, every env var — verified live with zero downtime, the old domain wiped from the mail server and re-pointed as a path-preserving 308 redirect. The kind of cleanup that usually means a weekend of broken links and bounced mail; here it was a single afternoon, end to end.

🔒portoverdelab.com

Architecture

One chain replaced by another. Receipts above.

Old stack

Registrar parking
No pages
No quote funnel
No compliance surface
No email
Referral-only

↓

New stack

Next.js 15
Tailwind v4
Vercel edge
GoDaddy DNS
Neon + Drizzle
Presigned uploads
Stalwart + SES email
METRC / Prop 65 surface

What changed

Grouped by what kind of system shipped.

Each claim ships with concrete evidence — env vars, table names, cadence chips. No marketing fluff.

Design

A hero shot on the real floor — not clip art

The landing hero is a clean editorial composition: a framed plate of the actual C1D1 extraction cleanroom with a glass spec rail (Extraction · Co-Pack · Packaging · METRC). An earlier draft used a gimmicky parallax-tilting, idle-bobbing photo cluster borrowed from another site; it was scrapped for the static, confident composition a procurement buyer expects. Real facility photography (extraction skid, cleanroom, Futurola staging, labeling room) carries every service and equipment page.

Before: No site at all — a registrar parking page with sponsored-search spam.
After: A facility hero + real floor photography across 13 pages.

Design

Industrial-premium positioning — and honest about what the lab is

Green / brass-gold / near-black, Space Grotesk + Inter, generous whitespace — pharma-grade, not dispensary kitsch, no leaf clichés. Just as important, the copy is precise about the business: Porto Verde is a micro-processor and co-packer, so the site never claims to cultivate. Flower appears only as a brand-supplied input ('you bring the extract, distillate, or biomass'); 'seed-to-sale' was replaced with 'intake-to-manifest' throughout.

Before: Nothing communicated what the lab does, or doesn't, do.
After: A B2B identity that reads as a manufacturer — accurate to the license.

Retention

A quote funnel that takes the brand's artwork

The conversion path isn't a mailto: link. It's a structured Request-a-Quote form — company, contact, product type, multi-select services, volume, timeline — with a drag-and-drop artwork dropzone that accepts PDF / AI / PSD / EPS / PNG up to 100 MB via presigned direct-to-storage uploads, with per-file progress and a spam honeypot. Submissions land in Neon and notify the operator by email.

Before: Reachable by phone and word of mouth; no way to send a brief or artwork.
After: Brands scope a project and upload print-ready files in one step.

Agent backbone

A one-letter domain typo, migrated across 8 live systems with zero downtime

After launch the owner noticed the domain was misspelled — portAverde, not the brand's portOverde — and bought the correct one. Instead of a risky big-bang cutover, the whole stack was migrated in place and verified live the same session: site code + canonical/OG, the Vercel project domain, GoDaddy DNS, the self-hosted email domain + four mailboxes, the AWS SES identity + DKIM, every email environment variable, and this case study itself. The misspelled domain wasn't deleted — it was re-pointed as a 308, path-preserving redirect, so a typo or an old link still lands the visitor on the exact right page.

Before: Whole site + email built on a misspelled domain.
After: Everything on the correct domain; the typo domain 308-redirects to it.

Correct domain verified live (HTTP 200, valid SSL) the same session
Old domain decommissioned from Vercel + the mail server, then re-added as a redirect
portaverdelab.com/equipment → 308 → portoverdelab.com/equipment (path preserved)

Retention

Real, self-hosted email on owned infrastructure — DKIM-aligned, not a SaaS inbox

Email doesn't run on Google or Microsoft — it's a self-hosted Stalwart server (Hetzner) relayed through AWS SES. Provisioned info@, accounts@, sales@, and noreply@ with MX, SPF, DMARC, the server's own DKIM, and three SES DKIM CNAMEs so outbound passes DMARC alignment; the SES identity verifies clean. The site's quote funnel sends lead notifications through this pipeline, with replies threaded back to the brand that submitted.

Before: No domain email at all.
After: Four DKIM-aligned mailboxes on infrastructure the operator owns.

4 mailboxes provisioned via the operator's own claw_mail toolkit (idempotent, API-published DNS)
SES identity Verified; DKIM-aligned outbound
Lead form → noreply@ SMTP → routed to info@ / sales@

Agent backbone

An honest engine — every unverified number wears a 'TBC'

Procurement sites lie with confidence; this one refuses to. Throughput, MOQ, lead times, and the DCC license number render with a visible 'TBC' marker until the partner confirms the real figure, and the equipment specs are softened to vendor-published classes rather than invented precision. The build ships placeholders honestly instead of fabricating receipts — the same operating principle as the rest of the portfolio.

Before: No claims at all.
After: Real claims where verified; visible TBC markers everywhere else.

Agent backbone

Equipment transparency the LA co-pack market doesn't offer

A dedicated equipment page names the actual hardware — CTM Front/Back/Wrap pressure-sensitive labeling (vendor-published 90–120 ft/min) and FlexPackPRO thermal-transfer coding (up to ~32 in/sec, ~300 dpi class) — alongside the extraction, pre-roll, cart, and gummy lines, with real photos of the floor. A competitive scan of six LA / Long Beach co-packers found none that show a per-batch COA portal, live throughput, or their machines; this page is built to own that gap.

Before: No equipment, no specs, no proof of capability.
After: Named machines + vendor specs + real floor photos.

← All rebuilds