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.
Charlotte, NC
Shopify Store Design & Development in Charlotte, NC
Custom Shopify storefronts for Charlotte brands whose catalogue has to answer a compatibility question, a freight question or a wholesale question before it can answer a price question.
Delivered remotely for brands across Charlotte and North Carolina.
Build · Charlotte
Why Charlotte brands come to us for this
- Year-make-model and engine-code fitment built as structured product data driving search, filters and an on-page compatibility check
- Freight-class templates for Hickory-built furniture: dimensional profiles, LTL rates, liftgate flags and lead time stated before checkout
- One catalogue serving a DTC storefront and a gated wholesale view, so a Gastonia mill can go direct without running two stores
- Legacy part-number, supersession and swatch data normalised into metafields before a single section is designed
- Launch windows scoped around High Point Market, PRI and the Speedway race weekends rather than a generic go-live date
Most Charlotte storefronts fail at the same moment: the point where a buyer needs to know whether the thing fits. A crank pulley for a 2018 Coyote, a replacement cushion for a sofa frame built in Hickory, a knit weight a wholesale account needs to match against last season's programme. Generic themes treat that as a paragraph in the description. We treat it as structure — metafields, a fitment or spec object, filters that read from it, and a confirmation state on the product page that survives the customer changing their mind about which truck they own.
The second thing that shapes a build here is that a lot of these companies are not starting from zero. A shop in Mooresville has fifteen years of part numbers in a spreadsheet and a supersession history nobody has ever normalised. A knitter in Gastonia has three decades of contract runs and a brand name their retail accounts have never seen on a label. A furniture maker has a catalogue where half the SKUs are made to order with an eight-week lead time. The design work is real, but the build stands or falls on whether we get that legacy data into a shape Shopify can merchandise from.
Third, the buyers here are unusually numerate. This is a city where a meaningful share of founders spent years in a tower on Tryon Street before starting something, and where the person approving the build has read a P&L line by line. That changes what a storefront has to do. It means we baseline before we touch anything, ship a theme the client's own team can edit without a ticket, and hand over documentation good enough that the next conversation about the site is about revenue rather than about who broke the header.
Local context
The build calendar runs on race season and market weeks, not on quarters
Charlotte does not have one commercial year, it has three overlapping ones. Performance and aftermarket brands are merchandising against a NASCAR season that runs February through the autumn, with local spikes around the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway and the AutoFair swap meets, then a hard product-announcement window into the PRI show in December and SEMA in November. Home furnishings brands are pinned to High Point Market in April and October, eighty miles up the road, where the catalogue has to be live and photographed before buyers walk the showrooms. Mill brands going direct are working to a wholesale line-opening calendar that has nothing to do with either. We scope launches around whichever of those three you actually live in, cut over DNS in a low-traffic window well outside it, and stage the catalogue in a dev store first so you review a working shop rather than a Figma board the week before your market.
Scope
What Design & Build includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Charlotte 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 Charlotte store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Charlotte 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 Charlotte — your questions
Usually yes, but the work is in the cleanup rather than the import. We map your columns to a product and fitment model first, resolve supersessions so a discontinued number redirects to its replacement instead of 404ing, and flag the rows where two SKUs are clearly the same part under different naming. Expect to lose a chunk of the file to duplicates and to gain a catalogue your own counter staff can actually search.
Lead time becomes a first-class element rather than fine print. We render a per-variant production window from a metafield so a stocked swatch and an eight-week custom option display differently, put the freight and delivery method on the page rather than at checkout, and give your team a theme-editor control to shift the window when the plant runs long. Customers cancel over surprises, not over waiting.
The storefront gets built with the channel boundary designed in. Wholesale pricing sits behind a gated company login, MAP-sensitive promotions are handled with rules rather than sitewide sale banners, and the public catalogue can deliberately exclude programme-only SKUs your accounts consider theirs. It is a merchandising decision made before the build, not a setting toggled after the first angry phone call.
That is the point of the way we build. Sections are native Online Store 2.0 blocks so a marketing coordinator can rearrange a page, banners and announcement logic are theme-editor controlled, and every template ships with a written guide and a Loom walkthrough. We include thirty days of post-launch fixes, and after that most Charlotte clients handle their own seasonal changes.
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 Charlotte 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.