A Redesign & CMS Migration For Chillipad

ChiliPad (by Sleepme) pioneered the bed cooling category over a decade ago.

Their products are water-based, temperature-controlled mattress systems that regulate your bed anywhere from 55°F to 115°F. A brand at the intersection of sleep science, wellness tech, and DTC hardware. Their audience skews toward people who take recovery seriously: athletes, biohackers, entrepreneurs, people who need to be at their absolute best.

With international expansion on the horizon, ChiliPad came to Vaan for a redesign built to scale across markets.

The ask was straightforward on paper: redesign the homepage and PDPs. In practice, the limitations ran deeper.

The existing headless Shopify site was built on Nuxt and Strapi, held together with hardcoded HTML fields and workarounds layered on over time to extend a model never built to scale. There were no clear publishing workflows and draft states, and no way to schedule and approve content. Internationalization required duplicating entire instances for each language. Upsell and discount logic lived in a hardcoded Shopify script. And the client's team was spending engineering hours on legacy server maintenance, asset serving, image caching, crash recovery, instead of their product.

A surface-level redesign wouldn't solve the structural issues underneath. The scope expanded because it had to.

Every decision was designed to reduce long-term dependency and give the client's team real ownership of their platform.

CMS Migration: Strapi to DatoCMS

Strapi couldn't be extended without workarounds. Internationalization required duplicating entire content instances for every language. No publishing workflows, no approval flows, no scheduled publishing.

We migrated to DatoCMS and re-architected the content model from scratch. Proper locale settings for multilingual content, draft/review/publish cycles, and scheduled publishing with approval flows built in. Dato also took over asset serving and image caching the client had been managing on their own servers. Better performance, zero infrastructure overhead.

Adopting Nuxt

Chilipad's developers were already deep in Vue. Instead of forcing a framework switch, we trained our team on Nuxt and met them where they were. Nuxt sits on top of Vue the way Next.js sits on top of React, giving us the out-of-the-box functionality to move fast on a headless build without disrupting the client's existing workflow.

TypeScript Implementation

The previous codebase had no strong guardrails. Bugs surfaced mid-lifecycle, code quality was inconsistent across contributors, and technical debt was mounting. We introduced TypeScript project-wide, eliminating an entire class of errors and giving both teams a shared standard to build against. For a codebase maintained by two separate dev teams, this wasn't optional. It was foundational.

Serverless Hosting Migration

The client was maintaining their own legacy servers. Database upgrades and infrastructure monitoring were both eating into engineering hours. We helped move them to serverless hosting, handing server management to the companies built for it. Meaning less time maintaining infrastructure that has nothing to do with their product.

Scalable Cross-Selling & Discount Logic

The existing upsell and discount logic was hardcoded in a Shopify script with no flexibility or easy way to scale. We rebuilt it using core Shopify Functions, defining cross-sell and discount rules directly on the product model. Now the merchandising team can now manage promotions through the CMS without a development cycle for every change.

Reusable Component Architecture

Reusability was a core tenet of this build. Chilipad had a large amount of marketing material and interactive image sections they needed to deploy across the site with minimal friction. We architected a framework of reusable blocks that let them construct pages and templates visually, assembling layouts from a component library rather than building from scratch every time.

Chilipad's in-house dev team was embedded in our process from day one. We led new initiatives and brought our Shopify expertise to improve existing processes. They brought the context and institutional knowledge we couldn't have gotten any other way.

As Ziad Javed, Vaan’s Head of Systems Engineering, put it:

"We could have implemented things blindly, but their knowledge stopped that early on. And likewise, they were used to working a certain way because of Strapi's limitations, which we were able to drastically improve on."

The result was a hybrid team that moved faster and made better decisions than either group would have alone.

By migrating from Strapi to DatoCMS and replacing hardcoded commerce logic with Shopify Functions, Chilipad's site became significantly easier to manage, maintain, and scale. The content team got real publishing control. The dev team got out of infrastructure management. And the platform is built to grow with them internationally.

Check out the full site: https://sleep.me/