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.
New York, NY
Shopify Store Design & Development in New York
We build Shopify storefronts for New York brands whose catalogue turns over every season and whose buyers are half consumer, half wholesale.
Delivered remotely for brands across New York and New York.
Build · New York
Why New York brands come to us for this
- Theme performance budgeted for mobile browsing on a patchy subway connection, not a Chelsea office fibre line.
- Seasonal collection templates your merchandiser can launch the week before market without a developer.
- Variant and size-run architecture built for the depth NYC apparel catalogues actually carry.
- PDP templates that flex between an $58 impulse item and a Diamond District-level cart.
- Apartment-delivery UX: lobby, mailroom and doorman fields handled at checkout, not in support tickets.
A New York brand's storefront has a harder job than most. It has to sell a 400-SKU spring line to a consumer on an F train with one bar of signal, and it has to look right when a Coterie buyer opens it on a Javits show floor with the wifi saturated. Those are two very different builds if you treat them as design problems. They are the same build if you treat them as a performance and merchandising problem.
So that is where we start. Theme weight and image pipeline first, because a Manhattan-heavy audience browses on mobile in transit and the LCP number is the difference between a session and a bounce in a tunnel. Then merchandising: collection architecture that survives a seasonal drop, variant logic for the size-and-colour depth apparel brands here carry, and PDP templates that behave differently for a $58 tee and a $4,800 ring.
The other half is who runs it afterwards. New York teams are small, senior and busy — a two-person ecommerce team supporting DTC, a showroom and three retail doors. Every section we build is a native Online Store 2.0 block your merchandiser can rearrange the night before a market week without opening a ticket. You get the Liquid, the documentation and the Loom walkthroughs on day one.
Local context
Building for a Garment District catalogue and a SoHo customer
Design and sourcing offices are still clustered in the Garment District and SoHo, which means the catalogue you are building for changes twice a year and arrives as a line sheet, not a CSV. We build the theme around that rhythm: seasonal collection templates that can be spun up without dev time, look-based merchandising for editorial launches, and archive handling so last season stops eating grid space instead of getting deleted and losing its URLs. On the delivery side, a large share of your orders go to apartment buildings with lobbies, mailrooms and doormen, so address-line-two handling, delivery instructions and accurate shipping copy are conversion elements here, not admin fields. And the tax detail nobody outside New York remembers: clothing and footwear under $110 an item is exempt from New York State and New York City sales tax, which changes how you present price and threshold logic if you are an apparel brand.
Scope
What Design & Build includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a New York 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 New York store
We do not work off a rate card. Every New York 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 New York — your questions
Usually, if we start with the date rather than back into it. A conversion-led build runs eight to twelve weeks, so a February market means kickoff in November at the latest. If the calendar is tighter than that we will phase it: launch the storefront and the wholesale-facing pages first, then ship the rest after the show rather than rushing a full build into a week your team has no capacity to review.
Yes. New York exempts clothing and footwear under $110 per item from state and city sales tax, and Shopify Tax handles the product-level classification once your catalogue is tagged correctly. The work is in the tagging and in how you display it, because a customer seeing a lower-than-expected tax line at checkout is a small trust win worth keeping.
That constraint shapes the build. Every content block is a native theme section with a configurable schema, so homepage changes, campaign banners and collection reordering happen in the theme editor. You get a written guide plus recorded walkthroughs. If a seasonal refresh needs us, we designed it wrong.
Often not. If the identity is good and the problem is speed, editability or a template that cannot handle your variant depth, a like-for-like rebuild costs less and ships faster. We tell you which of the two you need in the audit, and we are happy to work from an existing studio's design system rather than replace it.
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 New York 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.