Shopify 2.0 offers a wide variety of extra features over its predecessor, and that’s exactly what Gym + Coffee were looking for. This clothing brand had simply outgrown their old store. While they had their own in-house team to work on the project, they were looking for guidance and some additional work from an outside agency with experience in Shopify upgrades. So we helped them to create a beautiful new online presence, complete with numerous apps and plug-ins that would help them to manage sales in a more streamlined and modern way.
Gym + Coffee started off simple, with just one product: they made great, comfortable, multi-purpose hoodies. Since then they have grown though, now offering a much wider range of both sports and leisure wear. Their international online store sells T-shirts, leggings, shorts, joggers, as well as water bottles, running bags, headwear and more. The brand promotes comfort and quality, and with a leaning towards the great outdoors – hikers are one of their particular target demographics – though the promise of the brand name “Gym + Coffee” retains an overall theme of flexibility and lifestyle.
Every client we deal with is different. Gym + Coffee were beginning to outgrow their old store. They wanted a new theme for it, that visually told their brand story, but they were also ready for a new system that offered a more streamlined and efficient way to sell their goods online.
In this case, the client was already preparing to undertake a lot of that work themselves using an internal team. However, upgrading to a Shopify 2.0 theme can sometimes involve running into all kinds of hidden issues and potential headaches, and so Gym + Coffee asked us to step in, as an experienced Shopify agency, to help coordinate the work and ensure a smooth transition.
As a result, we would play something of a supporting role here – taking over tasks that fell beyond the skills and experience of their own team, as well as providing oversight and guidance throughout the whole process.
From the client’s perspective, working like this can be a great way to keep costs down – and it means that updating to Shopify 2.0 need not be such a daunting proposition. Nevertheless, we knew that it would require some first-rate communication and project oversight from us, as we worked closely with their in-house team to bring Gym + Coffee 2.0 online.
There are a number of separate initiatives we worked on for this project. In the process of creating the perfect Shopify 2.0 platform for them, we helped Gym + Coffee with:
Additionally, we added some extra functionality by building a custom colour variant switcher for the new store. This allowed Gym + Coffee to display different colour variants of a product as separate listings on the collection page, while at the same time, allowing shoppers to easily switch between different variants (or “product siblings”) from the individual listing pages.
So how did we fare? The new Gym + Coffee store launched promptly on time, looking fantastic and providing all the improved functionality that the client had hoped for.
We are big advocates for this kind of Shopify 2.0 upgrade, as the newer platform is able to offer a number of handy advantages to users. Case in point, after Gym + Coffee’s 2.0 theme upgrade, some of the key benefits they were able to enjoy included:
The compatibility of the new theme will allow for easy integration of more apps in future, straight from Shopify’s theme editor and without the need for coding. Uninstalling old apps is just as clean and straightforward. This reduces future development costs, and the tidy integration of these features will likely cause a boost to site speed too.
Shopify has traditionally allowed users a greater degree of freedom when it comes to their homepage – for example by using ‘sections,’ content blocks on the page which can be turned on or off, re-ordered, and so on. With Shopify 2.0 however, this feature is available site-wide and it really does make a huge difference: resulting in greater control over customisation, and reducing any future developer costs.
We didn’t just leave Gym + Coffee with a better store, we helped them to take control over future customisations too. In addition to the section editor, their new Shopify 2.0 store also allows them to create custom templates inside their theme editor. This will be perfect for any one-off events for example, or creating custom landing pages for specific marketing campaigns.
Another improvement with the new theme is how much flexibility it gives when designing product listings. Previously, Gym + Coffee would have needed a developer’s help if they wanted to display custom fields or other types of content on the listing page – but Shopify 2.0 makes it easy to manage rich data and varied content types, to create eye-catching and interactive product pages.
