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Before / After · Case Study

Brubaker's Brutal Barbershop — a Montana barbershop shipped live in one session

  • Local Pro Services

JohnMark Brubaker cuts hair inside Raven Rock Armory in Montana. He had a Booksy listing and a family heraldic crest — no website. One session later: a live site at brubakersbrutalbarber.oglife.app with a 'Build your visit' cart (cash-preferred — no card processing bolted on where the shop doesn't want it), a Booksy-mirrored service catalog, a cookie-auth admin for orders, and a blackletter design system derived from the actual crest. Under the metal aesthetic is a full SEO layer: a HairSalon JSON-LD @graph with OfferCatalog + reviews + geo, eight per-service landing pages, FAQ, and IndexNow pings.

“The design brief was his actual family crest — blackletter, smoke, crimson, and gold, not a template with a scissors icon.”
brubakersbrutalbarber.oglife.app↗Repo → brubakers-brutal-barbershop↗
🔒brubakersbrutalbarber.oglife.app
jackiej.events — modern site

Receipts — measured

Numbers that moved.

0
Sessions from zero to live
was 0
0
Per-service SEO landing pages
was 0
19 open
Adversarial-review findings fixed pre-handoff
was 19 open
  • 0 → live site in a single session
  • 8 per-service SEO landing pages + FAQ + HairSalon @graph schema
  • 'Build your visit' cart — cash-preferred by design, no forced card rail
  • 19 adversarial-review findings fixed before handoff

The story

Problem · Insight · Build · Outcome.

  1. 01 · Problem

    A barbershop with a crest, a chair, and no web presence.

    Brubaker's Brutal Barbershop operates inside Raven Rock Armory. Discovery ran through Booksy or word of mouth; there was no site, no service pages, nothing a search engine could rank for 'barber near me' in his corner of Montana.

  2. 02 · Insight

    The brand was already designed — 300 years ago.

    The family crest carried the whole visual identity: blackletter, heraldry, iron and gold. Building from it produces a site no template marketplace could — and the metal aesthetic is exactly right for the shop's actual clientele.

  3. 03 · Build

    One session: design system, cart, catalog, admin, SEO layer.

    Next.js 15.5 + Tailwind v4 + Drizzle on Railway Postgres. Crest-derived design system, 'Build your visit' cart, Booksy-mirrored catalog, cookie-auth order admin, 8 service landing pages, FAQ, HairSalon @graph, IndexNow. Then an adversarial review pass — 19 findings, all fixed — before handoff.

  4. 04 · Outcome

    Live on a first-party subdomain, cash flow unchanged, discovery transformed.

    brubakersbrutalbarber.oglife.app is live on the portfolio's own platform (a dedicated domain is one DNS change away). The shop's cash-preferred model is untouched — what changed is that the shop is now findable, structured, and bookable.

Architecture

One chain replaced by another. Receipts above.

Old stack
  • Booksy listing
  • No site
  • No schema
↓
New stack
  • Next.js 15.5
  • Build-your-visit cart (cash-preferred)
  • Booksy-mirrored catalog
  • 8 service landing pages
  • HairSalon @graph + IndexNow
  • Railway Postgres admin

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 design system derived from the client's real heraldic crest

No barbershop template. The palette (smoke / crimson / gold), the Pirata One blackletter display face, and a custom vector icon set were all derived from JohnMark's actual family crest — the same mark hanging in the shop. The site reads like the brand because it is the brand.

Before
Brand existed as a physical crest and a Booksy avatar.
After
A coherent heraldic design system across every page.
  • Pirata One blackletter + smoke/crimson/gold tokens from the crest
  • Custom vector icon set, not a stock icon pack
Design

'Build your visit' — a cart shaped to how the shop actually takes money

Customers assemble services into a visit and submit — cash-preferred, with no card processing forced into a shop that doesn't want the rail or the fees. Orders land in a cookie-auth admin. The catalog mirrors his Booksy services so pricing never forks.

Before
Booking meant navigating Booksy's chrome; walk-in pricing lived on a wall.
After
A branded visit-builder with real prices, orders visible in a shop-owned admin.
Agent backbone

Local-SEO plumbing a one-chair shop never gets

HairSalon JSON-LD @graph with OfferCatalog, reviews, and geo; eight per-service landing pages; an FAQ surface; and IndexNow pings on deploy — the structured-data depth of a franchise, on a one-chair shop inside an armory.

  • HairSalon @graph: OfferCatalog + review + geo nodes
  • 8 service landing pages + FAQ
  • IndexNow ping wired into the deploy
Retention

19 findings fixed before the client ever saw it

An adversarial review pass ran before handoff and surfaced 19 findings — copy overclaims, a11y gaps, schema errors — all fixed in the same session. The client received a reviewed site, not a first draft.

← All rebuilds

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