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.
Cincinnati, OH
Shopify Store Design & Development in Cincinnati, OH
Storefronts for Cincinnati brands that already know how to win on a shelf and have never had to win on a screen.
Delivered remotely for brands across Cincinnati and Ohio.
Build · Cincinnati
Why Cincinnati brands come to us for this
- Carton logic mapped straight onto the PDP: hero claim, proof, format and count above the fold
- Structured metafields for ingredients, allergens, net weight, certifications and usage — filterable and feed-ready
- DTC-exclusive pack architecture so the site never competes on price with your grocery listing
- Cut-off and delivery estimates that use the CVG air and I-75 ground advantage you already have
- Theme built so a brand manager can relaunch a pack size without a developer ticket
The typical brief we get from this metro is unusual: the brand work is already excellent. Somebody in the room has run a category at a large consumer goods company or sat across from a Kroger buyer, so the claim hierarchy is disciplined, the carton is beautiful and the good-better-best ladder is deliberate. What is missing is the digital half. The site was built to satisfy a retailer's vendor form and a QR code on the back panel, and it shows.
So the build starts with a translation exercise rather than a moodboard. The front of the carton — hero claim, proof point, format, count — is the same information architecture that belongs above the fold on a product page. The back panel becomes structured metafields: ingredients, allergens, net weight, usage, certifications, all queryable and all reusable in filters, feeds and email. The pack ladder becomes real merchandising: a starter size, a value size, a variety pack and a subscription format that no grocery aisle can carry.
The third piece is speed and fulfilment honesty, and Cincinnati has an advantage most cities do not. With DHL's Americas superhub and a major Amazon Air operation at CVG, plus I-71, I-74 and I-75 crossing here, a merchant in this metro can promise later cut-offs and shorter transit than a coastal competitor. Almost nobody puts that on the product page. We build the delivery-estimate and cut-off logic into the template so the advantage you already pay rent next to actually shows up where the purchase decision happens.
Local context
A build that assumes you also sell on a shelf
Almost every Cincinnati brand we scope has a retail channel running alongside the store, and that changes the build in concrete ways. Pricing has to be constructed so the direct site never undercuts a regional grocery listing — which means the online assortment is exclusive formats, multipacks and subscription cadences rather than the same jar at a lower number. It means a store locator and a 'find us in store' path that helps rather than leaks, with the direct offer clearly differentiated on the same page. It means product data has to survive two masters, because the copy your retailer approved and the copy that converts online are rarely identical, and the site cannot contradict a label that a compliance team already signed off. We design the templates and the metafield schema around that reality up front instead of discovering it in week nine when your sales director sees the pricing page.
Scope
What Design & Build includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Cincinnati 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 Cincinnati store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Cincinnati 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 Cincinnati — your questions
Often less than you would expect, and we will say so. If the identity system is strong, the work becomes structure: template architecture, merchandising rules, product data and speed. That is a cheaper and faster engagement than a full rebrand-led build, and it is the more common shape in this city because the brand craft here is genuinely good.
Yes, and it usually helps. A shopper who wants a jar today is not your direct customer this week, and blocking that path just costs you goodwill. We put retail availability lower on the page and make the direct offer materially different above it — subscription pricing, a bundle, a size or flavour that never ships to a store. The locator becomes a trust signal instead of a leak.
Usually by splitting audiences before touching design. A first-party brand catalogue and a trade or private-label catalogue behave differently, so they get different templates, different filtering and often gated access. Once the split is made, the consumer side gets narrowed hard — most CPG stores sell better with fewer visible SKUs and clearer formats.
No. We operate from a single office in Albuquerque, New Mexico and work with Cincinnati brands remotely, and we would rather state that than list a coworking address downtown. Practically it means we are two hours behind Eastern time, so our morning overlaps your afternoon, and we fly out for kickoff and quarterly sessions.
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 Cincinnati 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.