Magento 2 & Shopify
A B2C storefront for an independent luxury fashion brand
An independent luxury fashion brand selling women’s clothing and headwear direct to consumers, needing a storefront that carried the brand properly and stayed fast as the catalogue and the traffic grew. Built on Magento 2, with the DTC journeys shaped by how the same flows work on Shopify.
Book a callThe brief
Luxury has a particular problem in ecommerce: the storefront is part of the product. A brand selling a considered, expensive object cannot present it in a template that looks like everyone else’s, and the details carrying that impression are exactly the ones that get cut when a build runs long.
The second requirement was ordinary and harder. It had to stay fast. Fashion catalogues are image-heavy by nature, and image-heavy is the most common route by which a beautiful storefront becomes a slow one.
Why Magento 2, and where Shopify came in
Magento 2 suited the catalogue structure and the degree of control the brand wanted over presentation and merchandising. That is a real answer rather than a default: for plenty of DTC brands Shopify is the better call, and we say so on our own Shopify page rather than pretending every project needs the heavier platform.
What we did take from Shopify was the shape of the direct-to-consumer journeys. Shopify has spent years refining what a DTC purchase flow looks like, and there is no prize for ignoring that because you are building on something else. The flows followed those patterns where they were better, rather than inheriting whatever the platform did by default.
What shipped
- A B2C storefront built on Magento 2
- Design implementation faithful to the brand rather than adapted from a theme
- Catalogue structure for clothing and headwear, including sizing and variants
- Performance work across the image pipeline and page rendering
- A structure built to scale as catalogue and traffic grew
- DTC purchase flows informed by how the same journeys work on Shopify
Staying fast with a catalogue full of images
Image-heavy is not the same as slow, but it becomes slow by default. The work here was ordinary discipline: serve images at the size they actually render, in modern formats, with the lazy-loading boundary set where the fold is rather than where a plugin guesses, and the space reserved so nothing moves when they arrive.
None of that is clever. It is simply the part that gets skipped, and it is the difference between a storefront that looks expensive and one that feels expensive on a phone.
Why this one is anonymous
The brand is not named here because we do not have permission to name it, not because the work is being hedged. Worth saying plainly: an unnamed case study is weaker evidence than a named one, and pretending otherwise would be silly. Wellocated, on the other project page, is named because they are happy to be.
If you want to see it, ask. We can usually show work on a call that we cannot publish, and we would rather do that than put a client’s storefront on a marketing page they never agreed to.
What this project shows
Custom & Headless Development Beyond the Platform
Next.js storefronts, custom commerce platforms, technical SEO and AI integration for teams the theme layer no longer fits.
Shopify Development & Support for DTC Brands
Themes, migrations, integrations and ongoing support for DTC brands on Shopify and Shopify Plus.
Tell us what your store needs to do.
Send a short note about the platform you're on and what's in the way. You'll get a reply from an engineer, usually within one business day, not a sales sequence.