Case study

By Malene Birger Oslo is the brand's flagship store in Norway and the only one in the country, independently owned and run by Merete Beckman at Paleet in Oslo. We redesigned the existing store on Shopify in the first quarter of 2025. Sales rose 40% over that year and the design held, but the platform underneath it did not. The store was still running on a Shopify 1.0 structure, and needed the upgrade to reach newer features and to build better customer flows. Every new page type was a request rather than a task, and the design rules lived in a document rather than in the store 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 work began before any design, with a review of the digital strategy and the naming. The store had gathered a mix of names across its domains and channels over the years, some shortened to BMB, some tied to Paleet, some to Oslo, and none of them quite the same. We proposed a single system, registered bymalenebirgeroslo.no as the official address, redirected the older domains to it, and renamed every social channel to match. It looks like housekeeping and it is closer to strategy. Many multibrand retailers in Norway stock the brand, so when a customer searches for By Malene Birger in Oslo, the store that appears under one name, on one domain, with the same handle everywhere, is the one that holds the city. Everything built afterwards sits on a single digital footprint rather than a set of unrelated accounts.

The channels work on the same principle, in two registers. The main grid stays brand-led, built from the campaign material, so the identity arrives exactly as the house intends it. The everyday content comes from the shop floor: the clothes on real people, in the room, in the week they land. Customers move between the two constantly, watching a fitting on a phone in the evening and walking into Paleet on Saturday, so we went with the team to their photography dealer in Oslo and built a filming set-up for the store, with a rolling stand and light fixture, a phone mount, and a microphone adapter so the sound holds. The framework is simple enough to keep: film weekly from the store, keep the grid on brand, and let the store be the personal half of the account in reels and stories.

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 store'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 layout stretched to cover everything, and structured content fields replaced the copy that used to be pasted into place.

Speed was rebuilt into the structure rather than 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%, sessions 49%, and average order value 4%. The store is faster, the team publishes pages without us, and the next round of work is a choice rather than a necessity.