Pieces of Time — Antique Watch

The Brief A world-class collection deserved a world-class site

Pieces of Time is one of the world's leading specialist dealers in antique and precision watches — a business with a heritage stretching back decades, selling pieces from the 17th century through to the vintage era, with individual items valued up to five figures. The site had been live since the late 1990s and, while it had been updated over the years, it was still carrying significant visual and technical debt. A dark grey sidebar layout, outdated typography, and a generic WooCommerce skin were doing serious disservice to an exceptional inventory.

The brief was a full redesign and rebuild: modernise the visual identity, dramatically improve PageSpeed performance, implement Google structured data for products, and produce a site that felt as considered and high-end as the watches it was selling.

The Workflow The first fully agentic build

This was our first fully AI-agentic development project — a deliberate step into a new way of working, and a practical test of what the tooling could now deliver end-to-end.

The process started with Google Stitch: prompted to design a high-end antique watch homepage, it produced a visual reference that captured the right tone — dark navy, serif typography, premium product presentation. That output became the design foundation. A screenshot of the Stitch-generated homepage was then used as a reference for each subsequent page type: About, product detail, blog post, and from those, the category and blog listing pages were derived.

From there, the build was handed to an AI coding agent — with Steve directing, reviewing, and refining throughout. The custom WordPress theme was built against the Stitch-generated designs, with WooCommerce handling the ecommerce layer.

This wasn't a case of prompting and accepting whatever came out. The AI handled implementation; the judgment — about design coherence, technical decisions, and what actually worked for the client — remained human throughout.

What We Built Premium by design, performant by default

• A fully custom WordPress theme built to match the AI-generated designs — dark navy aesthetic, premium typography, refined product presentation
• WooCommerce integration for the full product catalogue, spanning 17th to 20th century watches across 14 specialist categories
• Google structured data (Product schema) implemented across all WooCommerce listings, improving search result appearance and eligibility for rich snippets
• Performance optimisation throughout — PageSpeed scores moved from red/amber to green/amber across the board
• A clean, intuitive category taxonomy carried over from the previous site but presented in a navigation structure that serves both users and search engines
• An Archive of Sold Items — a useful trust signal for a high-value antique dealer, showing buyers the calibre and breadth of previous stock

Before & After Nearly three decades in the making

The previous site had been serving the business since the late 1990s. It worked — but it looked its age, and for a dealer whose stock regularly commands four and five-figure prices, the visual mismatch between the quality of the inventory and the presentation of the site was a real commercial liability. The rebuild addressed that directly.