Industrial · Broken Arrow, Oklahoma
Phoenix Surplus
Buys retired gas analyzers, CEMS spares, sample pumps and shelf stock from plants, then puts them back into service. The selling side already had a channel. The buying side had no front door at all.
The problem
A plant engineer with a shelf of dead instrumentation has a disposal problem, not a shopping problem. They are not browsing. They want to know whether the thing is worth anything and who will take it away, and they want to find that out in about ninety seconds on a phone, standing next to the shelf.
So the site had one job, and every page had to do it: get a photograph of a nameplate into an inbox. Everything that did not serve that was cut.
The design decision
The instinct for anything industrial is condensed italics and a distressed texture, which reads as a truck decal rather than as a company that will wire you money. I went the other way: one variable typeface, Archivo, with the width axis doing the work a second font would normally do.
Display type is set wide and heavy, like a machined nameplate. Reading text sits at normal width. Specification data is set narrow, like a stamped data plate. Three distinct voices, one font file, one request.
Navy carries the majority of the surface rather than sitting in a footer, and orange appears rarely enough that when it does, it means act here. The listing photographs were shot on a workbench under bad light with hand-written TESTED stickers on them, and the treatment leans into that rather than hiding it, because that is the evidence the business is real.
What I built
- Nine pages: sell your equipment, what we buy, equipment cleanouts, the shop, about, contact
- 51 photographs of actual inventory, each with a thumbnail variant
- Organization and FAQPage structured data, with the answers written as real answers
- The same single action on every page, with one label, never reworded
The technical work
A committed headers file carrying a content security policy, HSTS with preload, frame-deny, nosniff and a permissions policy. Images and the stylesheet are served immutable for a year, with the stylesheet cache-busted per release so an edit still reaches the browser. Analytics is wired but scoped by the same policy rather than given a blanket allowance.
Where it stands
Live at phoenixsurplususa.com since August 2026.
