Conversion-Led UX & Wireframes
Wireframes for home, collection, product, cart and checkout drawn from your own session recordings, site-search logs and support tickets. Not a template library.
Austin, TX
Shopify Store Design & Development in Austin, TX
We build Shopify storefronts for Austin brands whose product gets consumed, reordered and shipped through a Texas summer.
Delivered remotely for brands across Austin and Texas.
Build · Austin
Why Austin brands come to us for this
- PDP architecture built for units-per-order, not single-unit browsing — samplers, multi-packs and subscribe-and-save on one template.
- Heat-season shipping logic surfaced on the product page: cold-pack selection, cutoff days and honest transit messaging for Texas summers.
- Retail-to-DTC translation: your Whole Foods shelf assets restaged for a phone screen where you get no packaging in the buyer's hand.
- Theme sections your two-person marketing team can rebuild for an SXSW week or an ACL weekend without a developer.
- Central-time launch windows — DNS cutover in your low-traffic hours, not overnight from another hemisphere.
Most Austin consumer brands were designed for a shelf before they were designed for a screen. The can, the pouch, the label — all of it was built to win three feet of space in a natural grocery aisle, and it works there. Then it gets photographed on white, dropped into a bought theme, and the store converts at 1.1% because nothing on the page explains why anyone should buy twelve of them instead of one.
That gap is the whole build. A product page for a consumable has different jobs than a product page for a jacket: units per order, flavour variety, subscribe-and-save framing, and an honest answer to the question every Austin shopper asks between May and September, which is whether the thing will survive a porch at 103 degrees. We build that logic into the theme rather than bolting it on with four apps.
The other half is your team. Austin brands run lean — often a founder, a marketer and a fractional ops person — and none of them should be filing a ticket to swap a hero for an SXSW activation or a Zilker weekend. Every section ships as a native Online Store 2.0 block with a documented schema, so the person who owns the calendar also owns the homepage.
Local context
Building for a shelf brand that has to sell online
Austin's natural-products ecosystem — the buyers, brokers, co-packers and formulators that grew up around Whole Foods after it started here — is exceptionally good at getting a product into retail and comparatively new at selling it direct. That produces a specific build problem: gorgeous packaging, thin digital assets, and a catalogue organised by SKU rather than by how someone actually reorders. We restructure it around consumption. Flavour and size become variants instead of separate products, multi-packs and samplers become first-class objects, and the PDP carries the summer shipping reality — cold-pack options, Monday–Wednesday cutoffs, melt disclosure — as merchandising rather than as a support ticket you answer in August.
Scope
What Design & Build includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Austin brand’s realities.
Full service detailCustom Online Store 2.0 Theme
A bespoke theme in clean, commented Liquid with modular sections your team can rearrange themselves. Zero dependency on page-builder apps.
Merchandising & Navigation System
Collection architecture, filtering, badging and cross-sell rules mapped to how your catalogue actually sells. Bestsellers surface; dead stock stops eating grid space.
Speed Budget & Core Web Vitals
Image pipeline, third-party script audit and app cleanup enforced against a hard budget: LCP under 2.5s on 4G mobile, CLS under 0.1, INP under 200ms.
Catalogue & Content Load
Products, variants, metafields, collection copy and redirects loaded and QA'd in a dev store before cutover. You review a real store, not a Figma file.
Launch, Handover & Documentation
Loom walkthroughs, a written theme guide and 30 days of post-launch fixes included. Your team owns the store from day one.
Scoped and quoted for your Austin store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Austin engagement starts with a fixed statement of work — named deliverables, named dates, one number — written after we have looked at your store, not before. If a smaller first step would serve you better, we will say so.
Get this scopedHow it runs
From kickoff to results
Discovery & Data Pull
Two weeks inside your analytics, heatmaps, site search and support inbox. We leave with a ranked list of what is currently costing you revenue.
Architecture & Wireframes
Sitemap, template inventory and grey-box wireframes for every page type. Signed off before a single pixel gets designed.
Design System
Figma component library, type scale and every awkward state: empty cart, sold out, pre-order, bundle, back-in-stock, subscription upsell.
Build & QA
Liquid development in a dev store, tested on real devices and against your live app stack. Accessibility checked to WCAG 2.1 AA.
Launch & Measure
Redirect map, tracking validation, DNS cutover on a low-traffic window. Then 30 days of monitoring against the pre-launch baseline.
Proof
Design & Build results
Anonymised under NDA. Figures pulled from the client’s own analytics.
Performance Apparel (DTC)
~$6M/yr DTC, 900+ SKUs across size and colour variants, US · Shopify Plus
Returns ran at 31% and refund cost consumed the entire paid media margin. One size chart image served 40 different fits, and 62% of add-to-carts started on a collection page that never showed variant availability. The named constraint: no new product photography budget, so every fix had to come out of the existing asset library and the review corpus.
+29%sitewide conversion rate1.71% to 2.21%, five-month average
+14%average order value$84 to $96 once the threshold bar and cross-sell shipped
31% → 22%return ratenine-point drop, roughly $310k/yr in recovered margin
1.9x → 2.4xblended MERwith paid spend held flat throughout
Home Goods & Furniture
~$11M/yr, 2,300 SKUs, configurable upholstery, US · Shopify Plus + Hydrogen storefront (Oxygen)
Fabric, leg and size options turned 2,300 SKUs into more than 40,000 variant permutations, and the Liquid theme rendered a configurable PDP in 6.9 seconds on mobile. Collection filtering ran client-side, so 40% of shoppers left before the first product painted. The named constraint: the ERP stayed. It was the single source of truth for stock and lead times and was not up for replacement.
6.9s → 1.4smobile LCP75th-percentile field data on configurable PDPs
+64%CVR on configurable products0.44% to 0.72%. Sitewide conversion rate rose 23%
+52%organic sessionsserver-rendered facets made 1,900 filter combinations indexable for the first time
+$2.4Mincremental annualized revenuemonth-8 run rate vs. the pre-build baseline
In their words
Clients on this work
AOV $58 → $79
“Full rebuild in 11 weeks, launched two days before Black Friday, which was an aggressive ask and probably a stupid one on my part. They pushed back hard on three homepage ideas I was attached to and were right about all three. AOV went from $58 to $79, mostly off the bundle builder they put on the product page.”
CEOHome fragrance brand, ~$6M/yr · Phoenix, AZ
Verified via Shopify Partner referralFAQ
Design & Build in Austin — your questions
Rarely, if it is built with the channel in mind. Direct usually earns its keep on the SKUs retail will not stock — sampler packs, bundles, limited flavours and subscription-only sizes — plus first-party data your retail partners will never hand you. We set pricing display and promotion rules so your direct channel does not undercut the accounts carrying your volume.
As merchandising, not as a disclaimer. Cold-pack or insulated options become a real line item at checkout, order-by cutoffs are shown on the product page rather than discovered after purchase, and destination-zone warnings are dynamic. Austin brands that hide the melt risk pay for it twice — once in replacements, once in reviews written in July.
Yes, and we would rather launch three weeks before either one than during it. A March or October activation drives a traffic spike into a store that has had no time to be tested. We plan the cutover into the quiet stretch ahead of it, then keep a freeze window over the event itself.
You need a digital extension of it. Packaging design assumes the buyer is holding the product; a phone screen gives you none of that, so ingredient hierarchy, scale references and flavour differentiation have to be rebuilt for a 390px viewport. We usually agree that extension in week one rather than arguing about brand guidelines in week six.
Eight to twelve weeks for most brands, from kickoff to live. A single-catalogue store with clean product data lands closer to eight. Add subscriptions, B2B, or a multi-market rollout and you are looking at fourteen to eighteen. We give you a dated Gantt in week one and update it weekly.
We build on Shopify's Dawn reference theme and replace the sections we need. That gives you Shopify's own performance and accessibility baseline plus a codebase that survives platform updates. Premium themes carry code you will never use and cannot safely delete.
That is the point. Every content block is a native theme section with a schema your merchandiser can configure in the theme editor. You get a written guide and recorded walkthroughs. If you still need us for a homepage change, we built it wrong.
Next step
Design & Build for your Austin brand.
Thirty minutes with the strategist who would actually run your account. We screen-share your store, read your data live, and tell you the three highest-value things we can see from the outside.
Shopify or Shopify Plus stores doing $150k/mo or moreFounder, CEO or eCommerce lead on the callNo deck and no pitch — we open your store instead
Prefer to write it out? [email protected] gets a real reply the same business day, Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm MT.