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.
Boston, MA
Shopify Store Design & Development in Boston, MA
Custom Shopify storefronts for Boston brands whose year is shaped by a semester, a storm season and a two-day transit limit.
Delivered remotely for brands across Boston and Massachusetts.
Build · Boston
Why Boston brands come to us for this
- Move-in, commencement and quiet-season homepages built as swappable sections, not developer tickets
- Supplement PDPs that settle subscription cadence before add-to-cart and keep claims inside structure-and-function language
- Cold-chain product pages: ship day, transit-time limit and insulated packaging shown before the customer commits
- Outerwear and footwear templates built on fabric weight, fill and layering specs rather than lifestyle imagery
- Speed budget enforced for the September spike, with an app freeze inside the peak window
A Boston store does not have four even quarters. It has a semester. Late August puts moving trucks on Storrow Drive and triples the traffic on anything a student or a parent buys, May does a shorter version of the same thing around commencement, and between those pulses sit long flat stretches that a national playbook will tell you to fix with a discount. A storefront built for a smooth year handles that badly: the homepage that made sense in October is the wrong homepage on August 24th, and it takes a developer three days to change it.
So we build the merchandising to be reprogrammed, not rebuilt. Move-in bundles, parent-facing gifting, commencement sets and a quiet-season layout all live as native Online Store 2.0 sections your merchandiser swaps in an afternoon. The same discipline applies to the categories Boston actually produces. A supplement PDP has to settle the subscription decision above the add-to-cart and keep its claims inside structure-and-function language. A heritage outerwear PDP sells on fill weight, fabric weight and layering, not on a lifestyle photograph. A seafood PDP is useless without ship day, transit limit and packaging shown before the customer commits.
The third condition is what happens under load. Move-in week is when a store finds out that its theme is a page builder wearing a costume, that someone installed a countdown app the previous Friday, and that mobile LCP on the collection page is 4.6 seconds on a phone riding the Red Line. We build against a hard speed budget, test on real devices on real networks, and we do not let a new app land inside the peak window. The build is finished and boring by early August, which is the entire point.
Local context
The build calendar runs on the academic year
We scope Boston builds backwards from the two windows you cannot move. Discovery and design run January through March or across June and July, development and QA land in the shoulder, and DNS cutover happens with at least three clear weeks in front of move-in — never in the last fortnight of August and never in the week before commencement. Winter gets designed in rather than survived: storm banners, shipping cutoffs and a delivery-promise message your team triggers from the theme editor at six in the morning when a nor'easter closes your fulfilment partner, without calling us. And because we work from Albuquerque on Mountain Time, your morning is our early start and we overlap with your whole afternoon, which is when launch-week decisions actually get made.
Scope
What Design & Build includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Boston 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 Boston store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Boston 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 Boston — your questions
It changes the sequence more than the design. Everything that touches performance is finished and frozen before August, because the worst version of move-in week is a theme change shipped on the Thursday. We also build the seasonal layouts as configurable sections so your team runs the peak without a developer, and we load-test the collection and cart templates rather than assuming Shopify absorbs it.
A subscription decision made before add-to-cart rather than as a checkout afterthought, a supplement facts panel rendered as structured content instead of a JPEG nobody can read on a phone, and a claims block written in structure-and-function language your reviewer will actually sign. We also build the regimen logic so a two-product routine is one purchase, not two.
Yes, and for perishable catalogues it should. We build ship-day selection with transit-time limits by zone, plus a hold control your team switches on from the theme editor that closes the affected ship days and swaps the delivery message across the site. It is far cheaper than a Monday morning of replacement claims after a Friday nor'easter.
Our only office is in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Boston is served remotely and we would rather say that than list a co-working address in the Seaport. On Mountain Time we are two hours behind you, so your morning is quiet working time for us and the afternoon is a full shared window. We fly in for kickoff and annual planning when it earns the trip.
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 Boston 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.