AK Operators Union

AK Operators Union Local 47-74 sells AK optics, mounts, parts and union gear from Hartville, Missouri. Rob runs it, and he posts his gear reviews, fixes and range tests on its YouTube channel.

I built the store's last site on the Kadence theme and its add-ons, and I've since moved on to more modern, professional tools for building sites. Its emails came from Kadence's email designer, and its newsletter ran on MailerLite.

I built the new site on a copy of the store, so the live store kept taking orders while I worked. Rob answered my open questions, asked for one change to the order emails, and told me to launch it as soon as it was ready. It went live on November 8, 2026.

I rebuilt the store on Bricks and Automatic.css, on the same WordPress and WooCommerce that already held its 79 products, its orders and its customers, and every page kept its address. I drew up five design directions and picked Surplus Crate. The categories are numbered crates, each with its item count, every product wears its stock number like a tag, and the stencil type is saved for the big headline and the section numbers. Light and dark are both designed, with a toggle in the header.

Finding gear got easier. The shop filters by crate, price, stock and rating, and on a phone the filters open in a sheet of their own. The header search shows top matches with photos and prices as you type, suggests searches, and can look inside one crate. On a product page the options are buttons, with any price difference shown on the button, and the cart slides out, so a shopper stays on the page.

I drew a new logo, too, built to read on a phone: the rifle redrawn as clean shapes and the name set in the site's own type. The 18+ age check was rebuilt in the new design, the email pop-ups went, and the store got a privacy policy. I checked every page at phone, tablet and desktop widths in both themes before launch, and again on the live site after the switch.