BuddyBrands

The starting point was a site that converted. Adam Bishop, who designs for BuddyBrands, put it plainly: the store was in a good place from a UX and conversion point of view. The problem was everything underneath it. Replo and legacy PageFly code had piled up over several rounds of development, so every page carried weight it didn't need, small changes had become expensive, and Shopify Markets couldn't do its job because a third-party builder was controlling things like currency display. Products that shouldn't appear in a region showed as sold out instead.

Then the roadmap arrived. SneakerBuddy was coming under the BootBuddy umbrella, SizzleBuddy and PawBuddy were already selling, and more brands were planned. A 1:1 replica of the existing single-brand theme would have meant reworking most of it within the year. The site had to give each brand its own space and identity, cross-sell between them without confusing anyone who'd arrived to buy a BootBuddy, and stay editable by the team without a developer on call.

There was a commercial constraint too. Sales were strong, so the switchover couldn't interrupt trading, and the cart and checkout had to be right first time.

One theme, brand-aware from the ground up. Rather than a fixed theme with a colour swap, we built a metafield-driven brand layer. Each brand carries its logo, its primary, secondary and tertiary colours and its URL, and every page, collection, product and blog can be assigned a brand. Sections read that context and adapt: the header logo, accent colours, buttons, hover states and the mega menu all follow the brand you're in. A persistent tab bar keeps all four brands one click away on every page.

Landing pages weighted 80/20. Each brand gets a homepage-style landing page led by its own hero, best sellers and story, with the other brands present but secondary. That's the cross-sell without the friction: a PawBuddy customer sees PawBuddy, and discovers shoe care on the way down the page. Adam Bishop designed the pages in Figma; we built the architecture in parallel so integration was fast once designs landed.

Product pages that lock in the brand. We built four PDP templates, one per brand, so colours and typography are always right, and product sections can be switched on or off per product rather than appearing everywhere. On BootBuddy, the page accent follows the colour variant the customer picks. Kit bundles, buy-two-save-10% automatic discounts and add-on products sit in the buy box. SneakerBuddy wipes run subscribe-and-save through Recharge.

A cart built to sell. The slide-out cart is where most of the conversion work lives. A progress bar tracks the customer to free UK shipping at £30, flashes green when they cross it, then sets a second target for free express at £50. Brand tabs inside the cart pull products from collections the team chooses, so the upsell can lead with PawBuddy when there's a BootBuddy in the basket. Clearpay messaging sits under the add-to-cart. Every upsell is managed from the customiser, and we recorded a walkthrough so the team can tune it themselves.

One store for every market. With Replo gone, Shopify Markets could finally run internationalisation properly. The US store was folded into the UK store: a country picker, US-specific product templates, a fulfilled-by-Amazon callout in place of Clearpay for US customers, and the groundwork for the EU launch. Orbe handles geo-location so visitors land in the right place without a pop-up.

The new site went live and took no sales downtime. The team reported the launch process was straightforward and that the wider team thought the new site was great, which is the review we care about most, because they're the ones running it every day.

Real users tell the speed story. Google's Chrome UX Report puts the phone experience at 1.5 seconds to largest contentful paint, 113 milliseconds interaction to next paint and zero layout shift, passing Core Web Vitals on phone and desktop. That is what a native theme gives you that a page-builder stack did not.

Structurally, the business is in a different place. Four brands live on one storefront with their own identity, the US runs from the same store through Shopify Markets, and there are no page-builder dependencies left in the theme. New brands slot into the existing system rather than needing a new build. When BuddyBrands test new product page sections in Replo, we now rebuild the winners as native, brand-specific theme sections, so testing stays fast and the live site stays clean.

We continue to support BuddyBrands on a fractional basis, read more about the Fractional support we offer here