Case Study · Outdoor Retail
Sherpa
A headless Shopify storefront on Hydrogen for an outdoor gear brand, rebuilt for speed and flexible campaigns.
Sherpa sells gear for the journey, and its theme-based Shopify store was slowing that journey down. Pages took nearly five seconds to load, mobile shoppers dropped off, and every campaign change waited on a developer. We rebuilt the storefront headless on Shopify Hydrogen.
Client / Product Overview
An outdoor gear brand — “Gear for the journey” — selling jackets and technical apparel direct to customers online, with campaigns across its storefront that need to change often.
- Industry
- Outdoor Retail
- Services Provided
- Project Scope
- Performance and platform audit, headless commerce architecture, a rebuilt product discovery and product detail experience, and no-code campaign tooling for the marketing team.
Before
The Challenge
The store depended on its theme. Pages took 4.8 seconds to load, a stack of third-party app scripts weighed on every one of them, campaign sections were rigid, and publishing a campaign change took days. On mobile, the delay showed up directly as drop-off.
Approach
From the problem to a direction
Strategy first, then the experience, then how it looks.
- 01
Discovery / Strategy
We audited what was actually loading on each page and why, then separated the storefront from the platform: Shopify stays the commerce engine, while the customer-facing experience becomes its own fast, flexible front end.
- 02
UX Approach
Discovery was rebuilt around intent. Predictive search returns products, categories and content as you type, a quick preview lets shoppers check a product without losing their place, and the product detail page was rebuilt for fast decisions on a phone.
- 03
UI / Visual Direction
Forest green and cream with a rust accent, paired serif and condensed display type, and mountain photography — an outdoor brand that feels like the outdoors rather than a template.
The Build
Development
Built headless on Shopify Hydrogen. The architecture separates the frontend experience, a headless CMS, the commerce backend, APIs and integrations, and checkout, with analytics, personalisation, search, data and security as shared platform services — so each layer can change without rebuilding the others.
Key Features
- 01Headless storefront on Shopify Hydrogen
- 02Predictive search across products, categories and content
- 03Rebuilt product listing and product detail pages with quick preview
- 04Headless CMS for campaign content
- 05No-code campaign builder with A/B experiments
The Result
Final Product
A storefront that loads in under two seconds, puts the right product in front of shoppers sooner, and lets the marketing team publish a campaign in hours rather than days.
01 / 03Before: the theme-based storefront and its four performance pain points 
02 / 03The headless commerce architecture 
03 / 03Rebuilt product discovery with predictive search, beside the product detail page
Outcome
Results
Pages load 60% faster, mobile exits fell by a third, campaigns that took two to three days now publish in under two hours, and more shoppers move from product to cart and on into checkout.
- 4.8s → 1.9sLoad time (60% faster page loads)
- 33%Fewer mobile exits
- 2–3 days → under 2 hoursPublishing
- +22%Product-to-cart
- +17%Mobile checkout starts
Technology
- Shopify
- Hydrogen
- Headless CMS
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