The situation
Legacy Garage opened in Berhampore in the 1980s, started by Chad SK on Indian marques: Bajaj, TVS, Royal Enfield, with the expertise reaching sideways into BSA, Triumph and Rajdoot as those machines came through the door. It is now run by his youngest son, Sohel SK, and the work has widened without losing the original line. Service and repair still, but also emergency roadside assistance, legal modification on sports machines from Kawasaki and Honda, and restoration and fabrication for older bikes that no longer have a supply chain behind them.
Sohel is a rider himself, closely tied to riding clubs across the district and beyond it, and he came to us with an idea rather than a specification. Adventure riding and touring have grown fast in the region. Legacy is already the default choice for riders in Berhampore, and he wanted that to be reachable from the road rather than only from the workshop gate.
Roadside assistance was the centre of it, and the reason was experience rather than strategy. He knows what it is to be stopped somewhere on a district road with a problem you cannot fix yourself. At that moment the difference between help arriving and not arriving is whether reaching the garage takes seconds or takes effort.
What we found
The brief covered services and RSA. Sitting with Sohel, the thing that kept surfacing was not the garage at all but the people around it.
Legacy has a long-standing relationship with Road Runners, a professional riding group in Berhampore. Rides get organised, routes get planned, people turn up. None of it lived anywhere except in phone calls and group chats, which meant it existed only for those already inside the circle.
- The riding community was the garage's real distribution, and it was entirely invisible online.
- Rides had no record: no upcoming listing for someone who wanted to join, no archive for someone deciding whether this group was for them.
- A first-time customer had no way to see that Legacy was the centre of something, only that it was a workshop.
So we proposed a dedicated rides section: upcoming rides open to booking, and past rides documented. It was not in the brief and it turned out to be the part that carried the rest.
What we built
Roadside assistance
A rider in trouble opens the site and requests assistance. Location, machine, what has happened. The request reaches the garage directly rather than sitting in a WhatsApp thread waiting to be noticed. What used to depend on having the right number saved now depends on nothing more than reaching the site.
Services and the workshop
The full range set out properly: routine service and repair, legal modification work, and the restoration and fabrication side. That last part matters more than a service list usually does. A garage that can fabricate a part for a machine out of production for forty years is making a claim about capability, and it needed somewhere to make it.
Rides, with Road Runners
Upcoming rides listed and bookable, past rides recorded. It gives the riding community an address, and it gives a rider who has never been to Legacy a reason to look at it as something other than a place to take a broken bike.
How it is put together
A server-rendered Next.js application over a Laravel API, the same architecture we use where a site has to be both fast and findable. The frontend runs on Vercel behind a CDN; the API sits on shared hosting the client already pays for.
| Frontend | Next.js 15, React 19, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS. React Context for state, Axios and Fetch for data. |
|---|---|
| Rendering | SSR, SSG and CSR applied per route. Code splitting, image optimisation, lazy loading and route-based optimisation. |
| Backend | PHP 8.2 and Laravel 11, exposing REST APIs. |
| Database | MySQL |
| Authentication | Laravel Sanctum, session-based across the admin and customer portals. |
| File storage | Server-side, outside the public web root. |
| Notifications | SMS through a client-provided DLT-registered gateway, email through client SMTP. |
| SEO | Structured metadata, sitemap and robots.txt, with server-rendered pages. |
| Hosting | Frontend on Vercel with CDN-backed assets and CI/CD from Git. Laravel API on cPanel shared hosting, no SSH required. |
The hard part
Sohel asked for an app. We built a web application instead, and the argument for it is the same sentence as the argument for the whole product.
A native app is the obvious answer for roadside assistance right up until you picture the moment it gets used. A rider is stopped at the edge of a road with a machine that will not start. They have one or two bars of signal and no patience. If help requires finding the right app in a store, waiting on a download over a weak connection, and creating an account before the first screen, then help does not arrive. The install stands between the rider and the garage at exactly the moment nothing should.
So the requirement inverted. Not an app, but a web application that has to survive the conditions a native app was being proposed to avoid: mobile-first without exception, and functional on a poor connection. That meant server rendering so the first screen arrives as HTML rather than waiting on a JavaScript bundle, aggressive weight discipline on every route a stranded rider might hit, and lazy loading everywhere the payload was not needed immediately.
It is a harder engineering brief than the app would have been, and it is the correct one. A link works on any handset, opens in seconds, and can be sent by someone else on the rider's behalf.
Where it landed
Before the site, roadside assistance reached Legacy by phone and WhatsApp, which meant it reached Legacy only from people who already knew Legacy. Around ten riders a month. The intended audience was precisely the ones outside that circle: first-time customers, riders passing through, people with no number saved.
The site is still in beta, and the figure is rising. Local SEO did part of the work, and the rides section did more of it than we expected: people arriving for the community stayed for the garage.
I came to QueryLabs with nothing more than an idea for Legacy Garage, no designs or specs attached. From day one, their team stepped up as true partners. Multiple ideation sessions helped us refine the concept into a streamlined, high-impact platform tailored specifically for Berhampore.
The results speak for themselves: both Legacy Garage and Road Runners are benefiting tremendously, and the local riding community has become huge fans of their work. QueryLabs exceeded every expectation, and I couldn't be more grateful for their partnership.
What's next
Roadside assistance carries a problem the current build does not solve, and it runs in both directions.
Legacy dispatches a person and a vehicle to a location on the strength of a form submission. A request that is mistaken, malicious, or simply abandoned sends a mechanic forty kilometres for nothing, and the cost of that falls entirely on the garage. In the other direction, a rider alone on a road at night is told that someone is coming, and has no way to confirm that the person who arrives is the person Legacy sent.
Both are the same question: is there a real, present person at the other end of this. It is the question our lab exists to answer, and roadside assistance is close to a perfect case for it, because the stakes are physical and the trust has to be established between strangers in the dark.