Mangelsen: A Fine Art Gallery Rebuilt for Speed, Story, and Scale

A seamless BigCommerce migration and custom design for a celebrated wildlife gallery

For over 50 years, Thomas D. Mangelsen has invited the world to witness the wild. Mangelsen’s online gallery invites visitors into quiet moments in wild places. Each photo carries a story, a season, and the patience it took to capture it. The website has an important job. It must feel like a gallery, support high-touch purchasing, and give the team freedom to curate and publish with confidence.

Their new website build keeps that promise. It pairs design that honors the art with a platform their team can manage day-to-day. Collectors get an experience that is calm and considered, and the business has a new foundation for growth. Most importantly, it supports the brand's core mission: to make wild places feel personal, accessible, and worth protecting.

The Challenge

A Platform That No Longer Served the Vision

Despite the prestige of the brand, the previous eCommerce platform, Magento 2, was limiting growth.

• Site performance had become inconsistent, with frequent slowdowns during high-traffic periods.
• Content management was complex, requiring developer support for basic updates.
• Variant management was cumbersome, especially for high-SKU products with dozens of size/frame combinations.
• Technical maintenance costs were rising, pulling focus from content and customer experience.

It was clear the current platform was no longer aligned with Mangelsen’s goals. The team needed a future-proof solution that could elevate the brand while simplifying operations.

Opportunities to serve the art and the team

As the collection and audience grew, the online store needed to do more. The team wanted faster publishing without tickets, a smoother way to present print sizes and frames, and a platform that felt predictable during traffic spikes. They also wanted day-to-day changes to be simpler, so content and merchandising could move at the speed of the brand.

The Vision

A Platform Built for Art and Agility

Mangelsen wanted to provide a gallery experience that is beautiful, fast, and easy to manage. The goal was to protect the brand’s visual standards, improve mobile performance, strengthen accessibility, and give the internal team no-code tools for building pages, rotating features, and telling stories.

They needed a platform that would:

• Reduce long-term maintenance costs
• Handle hundreds of product variants (critical for custom print sizes and frames)
• Offer creative control without constant developer involvement
• Provide a faster, more intuitive experience for customers across all devices

That’s where SwiftOtter and BigCommerce came in.

Goals for the New Site

1. Migrate cleanly from Magento to BigCommerce without losing customer or order data.
2. Modernize the design to reflect the beauty of Mangelsen’s work on every screen.
3. Improve site speed, mobile experience, and accessibility.
4. Enable marketing agility with no-code page editing tools.
5. Reduce total cost of ownership by streamlining tech and simplifying operations.

The SwiftOtter Approach

Structured process that protects data and rankings, elevates the gallery experience, and enables quick, repeatable updates.

• Migration with preservation
• Moved from Magento to BigCommerce, brought products, customers, orders, categories, and metadata, then mapped 301s to protect search equity.
• Design system
• Gallery-first typography, spacing, image handling, and PDP options that make size, frame, and finish selection simple on mobile and desktop.
• Component library
• Reusable blocks for banners, featured works, landing pages, and stories, so marketing can publish without tickets.
• Integrations
• Algolia for search, Affirm for financing, Heartland, Swym wishlists, ShipperHQ Essentials, ActiveCampaign, plus the native BigCommerce blog.
• SEO, speed, accessibility
• Clean HTML, structured metadata, GA4 events, responsive media through CDN, and targeted accessibility improvements.
• Project controls
• MVP first with a Phase 2 backlog, change requests for new asks, which kept scope and budget on track.

This wasn’t just a website redesign. It was a reinvention of how a legacy brand connects with collectors, advocates, and new admirers in the digital age. SwiftOtter is proud to have helped Mangelsen craft a site worthy of his life’s work, and built to last for the next generation of wildlife storytelling.

The Results

Performance that honors the art, built to scale

With the new site live, visitors experience a gallery that loads quickly, reads beautifully on mobile, and makes complex print choices simple. The internal team can publish without friction, build landing pages in minutes, and merchandise at the pace of the art. Clean redirects and structured content protect search equity, and the simplified stack is easy to run every day.

• Faster browsing on mobile and desktop with crisp, responsive imagery
• Clear size, frame, and finish selection that reduces second guessing
• Landing pages built in minutes using reusable components, no ticket required
• SEO continuity preserved with 301s and structured data, with GA4 events in place