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.
Washington, DC
Shopify Store Design & Development in Washington, DC
Storefronts built for a city where the same catalogue has to serve a dues-paying member, a procurement officer and a visitor holding a museum map.
Delivered remotely for brands across Washington and District of Columbia.
Build · Washington
Why Washington brands come to us for this
- Member-gated collections and dues-tier pricing resolved from customer records, not a discount code that leaks to a listserv
- Exhibition and conference templates with scheduled publish and retire dates, so a closed show stops selling the next morning
- WCAG 2.1 AA built at the theme layer with a written conformance statement your procurement contact can forward
- Shopify POS wired to the same inventory as the web store, so a museum register sale reduces online stock immediately
- Staging reviews staged as milestones for boards, committees and licensing officers who will not sign off on a static comp
Most storefronts assume one kind of buyer. Washington rarely gives you one. The same collection page may be viewed by a member whose dues tier entitles them to a different price, by a department administrator who needs a quote before anyone touches a card, and by a tourist who walked out of an exhibition thirty seconds ago and wants the catalogue that goes with it. A default theme shows all three the same page and quietly loses two of them.
So the build starts with audience logic rather than art direction. Customer tags and company records decide what a visitor sees; gated collections and tier pricing resolve on the server, not behind a discount code someone forwarded to a listserv. Exhibition and conference merchandise gets its own template family with publish and retire dates, so the show that closes on a Sunday is not still selling posters on Monday morning.
Then accessibility, which in this city is a commercial requirement rather than a nice-to-have. Institutional buyers here ask for a conformance statement in writing, often early, and an overlay script does not survive that conversation. We build to WCAG 2.1 AA at the theme layer — focus order, contrast, form labelling, keyboard paths through cart — and document it, because your procurement contact will forward the document to someone whose job is to read it properly.
Local context
One catalogue, three checkouts, and a review process before launch
Delivering a build in Washington means budgeting for an approval chain that does not exist elsewhere. A museum retail director may need sign-off from a communications team on imagery rights; an association staffer will need a board or committee to see the member-pricing logic before it goes live; a university shop has licensing rules on what may carry the seal and who may sell it. We plan those reviews into the timeline as named milestones with a real store to look at rather than a Figma frame, because institutional reviewers respond to a working staging URL and stall on a static comp. We also build around the calendar that actually governs this market: exhibition openings, annual meetings and the federal fiscal year closing on 30 September, none of which move because a development sprint slipped.
Scope
What Design & Build includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Washington 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 Washington store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Washington 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 Washington — your questions
Yes, and it should be one store rather than two. We use customer tags and company records so a logged-in member sees member pricing, gated products and their entitlements, while the public sees the open catalogue. The important design decision is what an unauthenticated visitor sees where a gated item would be — hiding it entirely loses the upgrade prompt, so we usually show it with a join-or-sign-in path instead.
We ask for the actual requirement in writing at kickoff, because 'accessible' means different things to a university general counsel and a museum's public programmes team. Then we build to WCAG 2.1 AA at the theme level and test with keyboard and screen reader on the templates that carry revenue. You get a conformance statement describing what was tested and what is known to be outstanding, which is far more credible in a review than a badge in the footer.
That is the point of the template family. Retail staff create the exhibition collection, attach imagery and credit lines, set the open and close dates, and the storefront handles the rest — homepage placement, navigation entry, related-product blocks and retirement. We record a walkthrough for your team so the second exhibition takes an afternoon rather than a ticket.
We work across the DMV remotely. The company keeps a single office, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and we will not claim a Washington address we do not have. We are two hours behind Eastern, which gives a full working overlap every day, and we fly in for kickoff and for pre-season planning when the scope justifies 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 Washington 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.