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.
Minneapolis, MN
Shopify Store Design & Development in Minneapolis, MN
Custom Shopify storefronts for Twin Cities brands whose product data was written for a retail buyer and now has to sell to a person on a phone.
Delivered remotely for brands across Minneapolis and Minnesota.
Build · Minneapolis
Why Minneapolis brands come to us for this
- Existing vendor-portal product data restructured into metafields, filters and comparison tables instead of rewritten from scratch
- Cold-weather PDP patterns: temperature range, fill weight, layering guidance and fit feedback as structured content, not a paragraph
- Bundle, kit and full-size-run templates so the direct channel sells what a Target or Best Buy shelf never had room for
- MAP-aware promotion and badging logic built into the theme so a sale banner cannot quietly undercut a retail partner
- Build scoped into the spring and summer stretch so the store is proven long before the first freeze and the Q4 run
Most brands we build for here already have excellent product data. It just lives in the wrong shape. Years of supplying a national account twenty minutes down the road means somebody has already written the dimensions, the case pack, the material composition, the UPC and the safety copy to a vendor portal's exact specification. That asset is worth more than a new photoshoot, and it is usually sitting in a spreadsheet nobody has looked at since the last line review. The build starts by turning it into metafields, filters and comparison tables rather than retyping it into description boxes.
The second thing a Minneapolis storefront has to do is answer a question a shelf never asks. On a Target endcap, the package does the talking and the buyer can pick it up. Online, a customer looking at a mid-layer, a bibbed ice suit or a mobility aid needs the same certainty from a page, which means temperature range, fill weight, wear-with guidance and honest fit feedback have to be structured content, not a paragraph at the bottom. In cold-weather categories the return rate and the conversion rate are decided by the same section of the page.
Then there is when it goes live. This market does not run on an even twelve months. The first hard freeze and the Q4 gifting run do a disproportionate share of the year's revenue, and the fishing and deer openers pull their own spikes forward in the calendar. We scope builds so the storefront is live, instrumented and already proven through a full ordering cycle by early autumn. A build that lands in November is a build being tested on the only weeks that matter.
Local context
One catalog that has to satisfy a shelf buyer and a web buyer
The structural difference in a Twin Cities build is that the storefront is rarely the only channel. Your assortment exists in a planogram somewhere, your everyday pricing is governed by a MAP policy, and a buyer you meet in person can see your homepage as easily as your customers can. So we design the direct channel to win on the things retail structurally cannot carry: the full size run rather than the four SKUs that made the shelf, bundles and kit-building, subscriptions on consumables, and content depth the package has no room for. Pricing stays aligned with your policy and the differentiation comes from assortment and service. Practically that means the theme needs bundle and kit templates from day one, a clean separation between what is retail-visible and what is direct-only, and an admin your merchandiser can run without a developer, because the person maintaining this store also has a line review to prepare for.
Scope
What Design & Build includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Minneapolis 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 Minneapolis store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Minneapolis 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 Minneapolis — your questions
Most of it, and it is the fastest part of the build. Vendor portals force a discipline that web teams rarely have: every dimension, material, identifier and compliance claim already exists and has already been checked by someone. We map those fields into Shopify metafields so they drive filters, comparison tables and your Merchant Center feed. What we do rewrite is the top of the page, because portal copy is written to be approved, not to persuade.
By treating assortment depth as the storefront's main argument. The collection architecture leads with the sizes, colours and configurations a shelf could never hold, and the templates support kits and bundles so a customer can build something a package cannot contain. We also badge the direct-only range clearly, which keeps the value proposition legible to a shopper and keeps your retail buyer from feeling ambushed.
It changes the cart and the product page more than the design. Dimensional weight, freight class and oversize surcharges need to surface as a real delivery estimate before add-to-cart, not as a shock at checkout, and winter carrier delays in this region need a message your team can switch on from the theme editor. We build the shipping profile logic and the estimate display together so the number a customer sees is the number they pay.
A named designer and a named Shopify developer, working Central time with you. ConversionEX runs from a single office in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and serves Twin Cities clients remotely — we do not claim a Minneapolis address. In practice that means an hour's difference at most, working sessions in your morning, and travel booked for kickoff or a launch review where it earns its cost.
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 Minneapolis 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.