Garden & Hire Spares — Magento Support & Agency Rescue
Garden & Hire Spares went from ~70 days affected by downtime to none after switching their Magento support and development to Takeoff Digital.
Project Brief
Magento agency handover, root-cause diagnosis of recurring indexing failures, codebase remediation, CI/CD deployment pipeline and direct-to-developer support for a specialist online retailer of garden machinery and hire equipment spares.
Project Client
Garden & Hire Spares
- Direct-to-Developer Support
- Root-Cause Diagnosis
- Zero-Disruption Handover
The Challenge
Garden & Hire Spares is a specialist online retailer of garden machinery and hire equipment spares, with a catalogue of around a million products, operating in a competitive, niche market where the website accounts for the majority of company turnover.
Their previous agency treated them as one account among hundreds — and the service reflected it:
- •Deployments took months, rarely went smoothly, and could take the site down for an entire day
- •A single support ticket could pass through half a dozen people before any action was taken
- •Automated responses arrived within the hour, but acknowledgement and resolution were two very different things
- •Persistent indexing issues meant products and categories kept disappearing from the site, directly affecting customers
- •Around <strong>70 days of the year were affected by downtime</strong>
The indexing problems were either not taken seriously or blamed on things the client's own team had done. Switching agency felt like a significant risk — in their market, any disruption to the customer experience quickly sends buyers elsewhere — but staying put had become the bigger risk.
Our Approach
- •<strong>Structured agency handover</strong> — a complete codebase, infrastructure and knowledge transfer with no gap in cover, despite an outgoing agency that made the transition harder than it needed to be
- •<strong>Root-cause investigation of the indexing failures</strong> — within the first month we traced the disappearing products and categories to a stack of misconfigurations rather than a single bug: category settings that were never set up properly, anchor categories enabled where they shouldn't have been, so every change invalidated the entire catalogue index, cron jobs that weren't running as they should, and a number of smaller issues on top. We fixed the causes rather than treating the symptoms
- •<strong>Codebase remediation</strong> — resolving inherited code quality issues, applying missing patches, and putting a proper CI/CD deployment pipeline in place so releases became routine rather than a risk
- •<strong>Direct-to-developer support</strong> — a straightforward ticketing system where Garden & Hire Spares speak to the people actually doing the work, with no account-management layers in between
- •<strong>Plain-English communication</strong> — sensible, practical questions instead of overly technical language, so problems are described once and resolved
The Result
- ✨ <strong>~70 days affected by downtime reduced to none</strong> during the first few months with Takeoff
- ✨ <strong>Indexing failures resolved within the first month</strong> — after the client had spent years struggling with the same recurring problem
- ✨ <strong>Site speed and performance measurably improved</strong>
- ✨ <strong>Tickets actually completed</strong> — quickly, and by the developers themselves
For a business that relies so heavily on its website, restoring reliability transformed day-to-day operations and customer confidence.
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