Case study
Replatforming a Fashion Retailer to a Custom Online Store 2.0 Theme
A legacy theme drowning in app scripts was costing conversions. We rebuilt it as a fast, sectioned Online Store 2.0 theme the marketing team can edit themselves.
- Client
- Northwind Threads — Placeholder
- Industry
- E-commerce
- Services
- Shopify Theme Development
- Published
- 40%
- Faster page load (LCP)
- 2x
- Conversion rate on mobile
- 0
- Developer tickets to edit pages
The Challenge
Northwind Threads (a placeholder name for a mid-size fashion retailer) had been on Shopify for six years. The theme had passed through four agencies and dozens of app installs. Mobile LCP sat above five seconds, every landing page change required a developer, and the marketing team had stopped requesting changes because they took two weeks to ship.
The numbers told the story: mobile conversion was less than half of desktop, and Core Web Vitals had been failing in Search Console for over a year.
The Solution
Rather than patch the legacy theme, we rebuilt it as a custom Online Store 2.0 theme with a strict performance budget.
The rebuild focused on three fronts. First, a script audit removed the remains of eleven uninstalled apps and replaced three heavy installed apps with native theme features. Second, we designed a section library — hero, product grid, editorial, lookbook, FAQ — that the marketing team can compose into new landing pages without touching code. Third, the product page was rebuilt around the mobile buying flow, with a sticky add-to-cart, streamlined variant selection, and reviews loaded on scroll.
Every template shipped with width-and-height-reserved images, responsive srcsets, and a total JavaScript budget under 60KB.
The Results
Within a month of launch the store's field data crossed into green Core Web Vitals across all three metrics. Mobile LCP dropped by 40%. Mobile conversion doubled against the pre-launch baseline over the following quarter.
Just as importantly, the marketing team shipped eleven new landing pages in the first six weeks — with zero developer tickets.
Tech Stack
The theme is built in Shopify Liquid on Online Store 2.0 sections, styled with Tailwind CSS, with Alpine.js providing the cart drawer and variant picker. Development ran through Shopify CLI with the theme under version control in git.
What's Next
We remain on retainer for conversion experiments — the current roadmap covers checkout extensibility upgrades and a bundle-builder feature. If your theme has become something your team is afraid to touch, we should talk.
