The problem
National Veterinary Associates runs thousands of veterinary practice websites. Each practice needed its own location, hours, and operational information. Some practices ran on entirely different backend technologies than others.
NVA had built a homegrown shell called the "easy editor" on top of an early version of Contentful, hosted on Azure blob storage. It worked, barely. A small content edit triggered a multi-hour blob deployment. A meaningful change took weeks. Nothing was static. Nothing had live preview. The deployment process was fragile in ways that compounded with every new practice brought into the system.
The system had been built to handle scale. What it actually did was punish scale.
What we led
Our founder sold this project in, scoped it, and led it from partnership pre-sales through implementation. The team was cross-functional. Marketers, designers, product, engineering, plus NVA client personnel. The role was connective tissue: architecture decisions, partnership management with Contentful, and the technical direction that kept the rebuild from becoming a replatform nobody asked for.
The approach was deliberately incremental. We kept the foundation NVA already had with Contentful. We rebuilt the template layer to be static-build with ISR injection so edits could deploy in minutes instead of hours. We unified the master template so variance across practices became a feature, not a maintenance liability. We integrated Yext directly into the stack instead of leaving it as a manual click-away tool.
The point was not to replace what was there. It was to make what was there actually work at the scale NVA had already grown into.
What this shaped at Fidget Labs
This work is why Fidget Labs leads with incremental modernization over replatform. The hardest part of an enterprise CMS rebuild is not the rebuild. It is the discipline of not throwing away the parts that already work. NVA's "easy editor" was easy to dismiss as legacy. It was also doing real work for thousands of practices. The win came from keeping the parts that fit and rebuilding only the parts that were broken.
Composable, done right, looks less like rip-and-replace and more like a surgical upgrade. That principle is now central to how Fidget Labs scopes every architecture engagement.
Have a composable architecture challenge?
Fidget Labs works with mid-market companies on MACH-aligned composable rebuilds, AI enablement, and the architecture work that makes both possible.
