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.
Berlin
Shopify Store Design & Development in Berlin
Custom Shopify storefronts for Berlin brands that have to satisfy German buyers, German law and a cross-border catalogue at the same time.
Delivered remotely for brands across Berlin and Germany.
Build · Berlin
Why Berlin brands come to us for this
- Impressum, withdrawal instructions and a payment-obligation order button implemented in the template so they stay correct as the catalogue grows
- Grundpreis generated from variant weight and volume data, which is the only way it survives a roaster or cosmetics catalogue
- Payment wallet ordered for a German buyer — invoice and PayPal first — instead of the card-led default a US theme ships with
- Address fields that accept a Packstation and Postnummer cleanly, because parcel-locker delivery is a default expectation in Berlin, not an edge case
- Spec-heavy templates for synths, cargo bikes and roasted coffee driven by structured metafields your merchandiser can extend
A German storefront carries furniture an American theme has never heard of. The order button has to name the payment obligation in words. The withdrawal instructions have to be reachable and correct. Consumables need a unit price beside the pack price, and a coffee roaster in Neukölln selling 250g and 1kg bags of the same bean needs that generated from the variant data rather than typed into forty product descriptions by hand. Get any of it wrong and nothing breaks visibly — the store simply carries a liability nobody on the team can see.
The behavioural layer is the part that actually moves revenue. German buyers reach for invoice and PayPal before they reach for a card, and a checkout that leads with card logos reads as a foreign store to a Berlin shopper. Address entry has to accept a Packstation and a Postnummer without a support ticket. Delivery expectation is specific rather than optimistic. These are half-day decisions in the theme that outperform a quarter of design polish, and they are the ones bought themes get wrong because they were never built for this market.
Then the catalogue. Berlin's categories are unusually specification-heavy: synth and studio-equipment makers with compatibility tables and firmware notes, cargo-bike builders whose product is configured rather than picked, roasters selling by origin and roast date, natural-cosmetics brands with full INCI listings. Each of those wants structured metafields driving the template, not a wall of rich text. We design the product page around what your buyer has to verify before they commit, and build it so your team can extend it without a developer.
Local context
One catalogue, three DACH realities, built in from launch
Almost every Berlin brand we speak to is selling into Germany, Austria and Switzerland within a year of getting the German store right, and retrofitting that is more expensive than building for it. Austria sits inside EU VAT and takes the same euro-priced catalogue with a different rate and different delivery expectations. Switzerland sits outside both the customs union and EU VAT, which means Swiss francs, customs paperwork and a real decision about delivering duty-paid rather than handing your customer a surprise invoice at the door. We set the theme up with Shopify Markets from the first sprint: market-aware pricing and tax display, hreflang that distinguishes de-DE from de-AT and de-CH instead of collapsing them, and shipping logic that will not quietly expose you to a country you are not registered to sell into. The English international market — the one that reaches buyers across the rest of the EU — is configured as its own market with its own catalogue rules rather than as a translation switch in the header.
Scope
What Design & Build includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Berlin 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 Berlin store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Berlin 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 Berlin — your questions
No, and we will not pretend otherwise. The company has a single address, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and every Berlin engagement runs remotely. Berlin is eight hours ahead of us, so recurring calls sit in your late afternoon and our early morning, and the rest of the work happens in writing. Anything you brief at the end of your day is usually waiting for you the next morning.
Yes, and it should. DHL's parcel-locker network is a normal delivery choice in Berlin rather than a niche one, and a checkout that rejects a Postnummer or mangles it in the shipping export creates a failed delivery and a refund. We validate the address format, make sure it survives into your fulfilment integration intact, and check the carrier label output on real test orders before launch.
German first, almost always. If you are selling to German consumers, German copy and German legal pages are the baseline, and an English-only store reads as an import. English earns its place as a second market once you are selling across the EU, where you are the foreign brand anyway. Building the theme with translation keys from the start means adding English later is a content job rather than a rebuild.
More than most themes allow, and structured rather than prose. A synth buyer wants I/O, polyphony, firmware version and what it does and does not talk to. A cargo-bike buyer wants payload, frame size against rider height and what the drivetrain is. We model those as metafields so they render as comparable tables, feed structured data, and can be filtered on in collections — none of which works if the same information is buried in a rich-text blob.
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 Berlin 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.