CASE STUDY/01·ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE AGENCYSHIPPED 2026 Q1 · MASTHEAD v4.2
“A sister brand that reads nothing like us, on the same chassis.”
★ FULL MASTHEAD BUILDAlmost Impossible Agency is AAL's editorial sister brand. Different voice, different palette, different buyer, shipped on the same Masthead platform as this site. All four modules: Design, CMS, AEO, Evolve.
TIME TO LAUNCH6 Weeks
BEACON SCORE87/100
EDITORIAL CADENCEMonthly
CORE WEB VITALSPassing
CONTENT STAFF3 Editorial
02 · THE BRIEFProve Masthead ships bespoke.
AAL needed a sister-brand site that read as a completely different company (warmer, more editorial, slower) while running on the same Masthead chassis as the parent brand. The work had to prove (to future clients) that “bespoke” isn't marketing language, and to the sister brand's editorial team that Masthead could support a voice very different from AAL's flat-dark engineering aesthetic.
03 · SCOPEDesign✓ INCLUDED
CMS✓ INCLUDED
AEO✓ INCLUDED
Evolve◐ ACTIVE
04 · HOW IT SHIPPED
Six weeks. Four phases.
01 · AUDITWEEK 0
Map the editorial gap.
Sat with the AIA editorial team. Cataloged existing content (127 pieces across 3 formats), documented voice attributes (warmer, slower, more essayistic), and scoped an AEO baseline on the predecessor WordPress site (scored 38/100).
02 · WIREWEEKS 1–3
Design + CMS shipped in parallel.
Warm off-white (#F4EEE3), burnt-orange accents, Playfair-italic-led type system. Custom Sanity content models for longform essays, client work, and writing archives. AEO-ready templates from day one: schema, llms.txt, author markup baked in.
03 · MIGRATEWEEKS 4–5
127 pieces ported. Zero broken links.
Custom migration script pulled WordPress exports into Sanity, re-keyed author relationships, preserved canonical URLs via redirect map. Editorial team trained on the new stack in a single 90-minute session.
04 · EVOLVEWEEK 6 → ONGOING
Ship. Compound.
Live on week 6. Quarterly Evolve retainer added in Q2: new Writing archive template, extended AEO coverage across every piece published, performance budget now enforced in CI. Beacon score climbed from 38 to 87 in 90 days.
01 · AUDITWEEK 0
Map the editorial gap.
Sat with the AIA editorial team. Cataloged existing content (127 pieces across 3 formats), documented voice attributes (warmer, slower, more essayistic), and scoped an AEO baseline on the predecessor WordPress site (scored 38/100).
02 · WIREWEEKS 1–3
Design + CMS shipped in parallel.
Warm off-white (#F4EEE3), burnt-orange accents, Playfair-italic-led type system. Custom Sanity content models for longform essays, client work, and writing archives. AEO-ready templates from day one: schema, llms.txt, author markup baked in.
03 · MIGRATEWEEKS 4–5
127 pieces ported. Zero broken links.
Custom migration script pulled WordPress exports into Sanity, re-keyed author relationships, preserved canonical URLs via redirect map. Editorial team trained on the new stack in a single 90-minute session.
04 · EVOLVEWEEK 6 → ONGOING
Ship. Compound.
Live on week 6. Quarterly Evolve retainer added in Q2: new Writing archive template, extended AEO coverage across every piece published, performance budget now enforced in CI. Beacon score climbed from 38 to 87 in 90 days.
CLIENT QUOTE“We spent eighteen months looking for a platform that could hold our voice without forcing us into templates. Six weeks with AAL and we had a site that reads like us, with the kind of editorial tooling that would've been a retainer at any agency we'd talked to.”
AIA
Editorial Director
ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE AGENCY
BUILT WITHNext.js 15Sanity CMSVercelPlayfair DisplayTailwind CSSFramer Motion
05 · WANT A BUILD LIKE THIS?Brief your own bespoke build.
Tell us what you publish. Tell us what's broken about the current platform. If it fits Masthead, we come back with a proposal within 24 hours.
TYPICAL BUILD6–12 weeks
OPEN SLOTS · Q32 of 4