BCAutowerx

The situation

BCAutowerx is a deliberately small custom shop in Mountain Home, Idaho, that takes on four to six commissions a year — bespoke automotive upholstery on one side of the shop, custom body work on the other. The two divisions share one standard: every piece leaves the building at show-quality. The owner needed a marketing surface that communicated that scarcity and craft instantly. The previous site read like a typical regional auto shop — a list of services, generic stock photography, no clue that the work commanded year-long waitlists.

The brief was: build a site that filters out the wrong-fit clients and makes the right-fit ones reach for the contact form.

The brief

A single-page Next.js marketing site with cinematic hero photography, a clear "two divisions, one standard" structure, and copy tuned to a buyer who books a year out and pays accordingly. The site had to load fast on rural Idaho mobile signal — much of the natural buyer audience for this kind of work lives outside metro areas with slower data connections. The brand had to feel like the shop itself: deliberate, calm, confident enough not to shout.

Architecture decisions

A Next.js single-page architecture deployed on Vercel keeps the entire experience under one URL with smooth scroll-anchored sections. Image-forward by intent: the hero showcases an actual finished commission shot in real shop light. We deliberately rejected the temptation to fill the site with rotating galleries — show one piece per section, in scale, and let the work do the work.

Performance budgets were strict from day one. Hero LCP under one second on simulated 4G is the bar; we hit it with sized priority images, font preconnect, and no third-party JS until the user interacts. The two-column division split is a single CSS-grid component that collapses cleanly on mobile without losing the rhetorical weight of the duality.

The brand system — typography pair, palette, voice — was custom built for this engagement. The palette pulls from the actual shop materials: deep oxide reds, leather-tan accents, charcoal. The display typeface earns its weight in the hero; body type stays lean so reading the commission process doesn't feel like work.

Outcomes

The site shipped on schedule and immediately started filtering buyers correctly. The owner reports significantly fewer "do you do oil changes?" enquiries and a higher rate of qualified commission requests with clear scope expectations. The hero loads in well under one second on rural 4G — measured live with WebPageTest from a mid-Idaho location. Local SEO surfaces the shop on the right kinds of searches: "custom upholstery Idaho", "show-quality auto body Treasure Valley".

What we'd evolve

The next iteration adds a thin "current build" section — one image and one paragraph from the in-progress commission, updated monthly — to give the year-long waitlist clients something to look at while they wait. A proper RSS or email-list opt-in for that update is queued for a future engagement.