Case Study · Nursem
Overview
We rebuilt Nursem's store on Shopify's Horizon theme, then built a fully custom Nursem layer on top of it, so the brand experience is entirely their own while the foundations stay fast and future proof.
Nursem started on a nursing ward and has grown into one of the UK's most loved hand and skin care brands, trusted by over a million customers and featured everywhere from Vogue to Marie Claire. Built into every order is a simple promise: one purchase helps fund care for nurses and hardworking hands. This project was about giving that brand and that mission a storefront to match. A shop that feels warm and considered, handles subscriptions and a growing product range without friction, and can be run day to day by the Nursem team.
The Challenge
Nursem had a brand and a mission that a standard storefront could not do justice to, and a product range that does not fit neatly into how Shopify normally works. Sizes and scents are sold as separate products rather than simple variants, subscriptions needed to feel like a natural part of the buying journey rather than a bolt on, and every product page needed rich, editable content: ingredients, routines, results, reviews and the giving story, without the team having to touch code to update any of it. They also wanted a foundation that would keep improving over time rather than a bespoke theme that slowly ages into a maintenance burden.
The Solution
We used Horizon, Shopify's flagship theme, as the infrastructure layer for the things it does well: cart, checkout, header, footer, routing and performance. On top of that we built a completely custom Nursem component layer from scratch. Product cards, product pages, collection grids and the full homepage, so nothing about the brand experience is a compromise or an override of someone else's theme. It gives Nursem the best of both worlds, a fast, web native base that Shopify keeps investing in, and a storefront that is entirely their own.
To handle the range, we built a product stitching system that presents separate products as a single Choose size and Choose scent experience, so customers get one clean product page instead of a confusing spread of listings. Subscriptions run through Recharge and sit naturally in the buying flow. Product pages are driven by Shopify metafields and metaobjects, which means the team manages ingredients, routines, results timelines, FAQs, upsells and customer content themselves from the admin. We integrated Reviews.io for social proof, connected the newsletter to Klaviyo, and added Google Analytics and structured data for search. The whole build is mobile first, accessible and quick, with the Nursem Promise carried through the experience so the giving story is never far from the buying decision.
The Results
Nursem now has a storefront that carries the brand and the mission properly, handles subscriptions and a growing range without friction, and can be run day to day by the team without developer involvement. Because it is built on Horizon, it keeps benefiting from Shopify's ongoing platform work rather than drifting out of date, and because the brand layer is fully custom, nothing is held together with workarounds or third-party app compromises. It is a store set up to grow with the business rather than hold it back.
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