La Danse case study

La Danse is a Norwegian boutique for dancers - dancewear, shoes and skating gear - selling through an online store INFIGO built in 2015. Eleven years later that store is still trading, on the same codebase, looked after by the same hands.

01 · The context

The interesting thing here is not the build. It is the decade after it.

Building a shop is a known problem. Keeping one trading for eleven years is a different one, and it is the harder of the two.

An online store sits at the intersection of everything on the web that changes without asking you. Payment providers revise their integrations. PHP moves through major versions and drops what it used to tolerate. Plugins are abandoned by their authors. Browsers change what they consider acceptable. A shop that was correct in 2015 is only still correct in 2026 because somebody kept making it correct.

02 · The build

A specialist catalogue, built for people who know what they want.

Dancewear is a technical purchase disguised as a clothing one. Sizes are unforgiving, brands are not interchangeable, and the customer usually arrives knowing more about the product than a general retailer does.

So the store leads with the things that actually decide the sale: brand as a first-class route in, product data with the detail a dancer checks, and an editorial section that keeps a small specialist findable next to competitors who can outspend it on everything else.

03 · The long haul

Year eleven looks like a scheduled migration, not an emergency.

The work continues. In 2026 that has meant moving the shop onto a current PHP major, staged and tested on a copy of the site before anything touched production, with the checkout and the accounting integration exercised first because those are the two things a shop cannot get wrong for even an afternoon.

That is the unglamorous version of longevity. Not a site nobody touched, but one that has been carried forward deliberately, one scheduled piece of work at a time, for over a decade.