For jewellery startup Milly Grace, it was important to give them a classic look whilst enabling ultimate configurability of their Shopify site by using the very latest tools and techniques.
Quietly innovative
As a small business, it was essential that Milly Grace be able to manage their store, and the content on their website, quickly and efficiently. The theme they had previously made this management harder for them, so it was a high priority to give them a really great management experience, whilst making sure that the front-end was beautiful too.
To accomplish this, I made use of the very latest tools Shopify had to offer; a new themeing system, and new guidelines for how to achieve flexible page layouts and content, which were brand new to the Shopify ecosystem, were employed in the creation of this theme. The site now gives the editors amazing flexibility - they can change the content and colour scheme of blocks quickly and easily within their management system, and I created a set of colour schemes that used their pallate and worked well together to make sure everything felt tied together no matter what combinations they chose to use.
The final piece of the puzzle was their blog, called "The Journal". Shopify's blogging system is notoriously bad, and most of the solutions out there in the Shopify ecosystem, such as Shogun, quickly become cost prohibitive for a small business if you want to do things like use custom code. So I set about creating a solution that would give Milly Grace an awesome blogging experience without needing to be tied in to another monthly subscription. I settled on a solution using Sanity to create content, and 11ty to render it on demand using lambda functions on Netlify, then using the Shopify admin API to fire the resulting html back into the Shopify blog. Its the kind of innovation that nobody who visits the site will ever know about, but its a real quality-of-life win for the client, and a truly innovative solution that I don't think anyone else has really done before.
The tech
Front-end: Shopify Dawn base, CSS3, Web Components, Eleventy
Back-end: Shopify & Sanity
Hosting & Cloud functions: Shopify & Netlify
My Responsibilities
Front-end development, Solution architecture, CMS configuration, Nodejs services, Infrastructure configuration
