By Malene Birger Oslo

We redesigned the existing store on Shopify in the first quarter of 2025. Sales rose 40 per cent over that year and the design held, but the platform underneath it did not. The store was still running a Shopify 1.0 theme, where every new page type was a request rather than a task, and where the design rules lived in a document rather than in the platform itself. A team of a few people needs to run a store daily without waiting for anyone, so we rebuilt it from the ground up.

The house typefaces are licensed, self-hosted, and integrated in code rather than approximated with a free substitute: the weights the brand actually uses, subset and preloaded so the type arrives with the first paint, with fallback metrics matched so nothing shifts while the page loads. It is the least visible part of a build like this and one of the most decisive. A brand that has invested in a typeface should see it on every page, in the right weight, on every device.

Type scale, grid, spacing, and image logic moved out of the guidelines document and into the theme's own settings, so the standard holds whether we are in the file or not. Sections and blocks replaced fixed layouts, and campaign pages, editorial features, and collection stories are now composed in house from components that cannot be arranged into something off-brand. Product and collection templates were rebuilt as variants for different product types rather than one template stretched to cover everything, and structured content fields replaced the copy that used to be pasted into place.

Speed was rebuilt with the theme instead of optimised around it afterwards. The migration carried the search foundation across intact, including URL structure, redirects, metadata, and internal linking, so a year of accumulated SEO work moved with the store rather than starting again.

Across the year to July 2026, sales rose 22 per cent, sessions 49 per cent, and average order value 4 per cent. The store is faster, the team publishes pages without us, and the next round of work is a choice rather than a necessity.