Fernmark
Aotearoa New Zealand's official mark of origin — a digital platform helping businesses leverage the country's global reputation to grow their brand with confidence.
The FernMark Licence Programme is a government-backed initiative enabling New Zealand exporters to display an official mark of origin on their products. The platform needed a modern rebuild to better serve licensees across diverse sectors — from food and beverage to technology — while maintaining a seamless content management workflow for the NZ Story Group team.
- CLIENT
- NZ Story Group
- SERVICES
- Technical Leadership System Design Frontend Development CMS Integration DevOps & Deployment
- TIMELINE
- Q4 2025 – Q1 2026
- YEAR
- 2026
Ageing platform requiring a careful modernisation
The existing Fernmark website was built on an outdated technology stack that had become increasingly difficult to maintain and extend. A major complication was the need to upgrade Tailwind CSS to a newer version for redesigned pages while preserving full compatibility with legacy pages that were not part of the redesign scope.
- Legacy codebase with outdated dependencies requiring significant upgrades
- Tailwind CSS version migration needed alongside existing legacy styles
- New and old page designs had to coexist without visual regressions
- Complex content structure managed through Drupal requiring careful frontend integration
Incremental modernisation with backward compatibility
As Tech Lead, I architected a migration strategy that allowed the team to adopt modern tooling for new pages while maintaining full backward compatibility with legacy content. This involved setting up the project scaffolding, designing the system architecture, and establishing deployment pipelines to support the dual-version Tailwind CSS approach.
- System Architecture
- Designed a scalable frontend architecture with Next.js and headless Drupal
- Tailwind Compatibility
- Implemented a dual-version Tailwind CSS strategy ensuring new designs and legacy pages coexist seamlessly
- Team Enablement
- Established project scaffolding and development patterns for the team to build upon
- CI/CD Pipeline
- Set up deployment infrastructure for reliable, repeatable releases
Key Deliverables
Technical Leadership
- Led system design and architectural decisions for the platform rebuild
- Established coding standards and project structure for the development team
- Managed the Tailwind CSS version migration strategy
Development
- Headless CMS architecture with Next.js frontend and Drupal backend
- Dual Tailwind CSS setup supporting both legacy and redesigned pages
- Responsive, accessible layouts across all device sizes
DevOps
- CI/CD pipeline configuration for automated builds and deployments
- Environment setup and infrastructure provisioning
- Streamlined release workflow for the team
Impact by the numbers
Delivered on the official government domain, held to public-sector accessibility and security standards.
A decoupled Next.js frontend over a Drupal content backend, giving the NZ Story team full editorial control.
No visual regressions on legacy pages while migrating redesigned pages to a newer Tailwind CSS version.
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SaaS & E-Commerce — 2026Want results like these?
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