Case File № 001
North & Pine
— a heritage goods store
Re-platforming a 12-year-old outdoor goods brand onto Shopify with a bespoke motion layer that honors the product photography and keeps checkout fast.
The Brief
A catalog that feels like the gear.
North & Pine had outgrown the stock theme they'd been running since 2019. Product photography was strong, the catalog had grown to 180 SKUs, and conversion was flattening. The team wanted a new storefront that signalled the premium side of the brand without breaking the things that already worked: product discovery, fast checkout, and clean PDPs.
The rebuild had three rules. Don't slow it down. Don't break SEO. Don't make the team learn a new CMS.
Approach
A custom motion layer on top of stock Shopify.
I rebuilt the theme on Shopify 2.0 with hand-written Liquid, and layered Framer Motion on top of the product grid for staggered entrance, hover state refinement, and a persistent mini-cart that never blocks the page. All transitions respect prefers-reduced-motion.
Collection pages use an editorial grid that reshapes per breakpoint — a magazine spread on desktop, a clean vertical rhythm on mobile. PDPs are rebuilt around a single sticky hero so the photography does the selling.
Outcome
A storefront the team can keep shipping on.
The new theme shipped on schedule and paid for itself within the first quarter. More importantly, the North & Pine team now edits everything through Shopify's native section editor — no handoff required, no "just one more request" backlog.
A written system documentation deck accompanied launch, covering section anatomy, motion principles, and the specific breakpoints where layouts shift.