- Client
- Becca Moravec, MA, LPC, LMFT
- Where
- Denver, Colorado
- Platform
- Shopify, with Printful fulfillment
- Scope
- Design, custom theme, product photos, SEO, speed
The brief
A store that looked like everyone else’s.
Belong is Becca’s second business, an extension of Full Bloom Counseling. It covers Enneagram coaching, workshops, consultation for other therapists and courses. It also sells Sad Girls Club, a merch line “for anyone who feels things.”
The brand is tender, a little eerie and drawn in a tattoo-flash style. The store showed none of that.
- It ran on Showcase, a stock Shopify theme: an olive banner, a line-drawn hand and a pink button.
- Product photos were a mix of white mockups, smiling stock models and Christmas flat-lays with pine branches and gift boxes, still up in October. Each sticker had six near-identical photos and no way to tell the sizes apart.
- The shop page was titled “Products.” No product had structured data, most pages had no share image, the store policies were blank, the blog held placeholder posts, and Search Console had never been set up for the domain.
Design direction
Ink, bone and a real moon.
I built the look around the artwork. A near-black ink background, bone-colored text, and blush and antique gold for accents. Headings are set in Fraunces and body text in Jost.
- Ink#0c0b0f
- Bone#e9e2d6
- Blush#e9a8bd
- Gold#b3a166
The moon runs through the whole site. On the homepage it isn’t a stock picture. The browser works out the actual phase as seen from Denver and shows it, with a small readout for illumination and the dates of the next full and new moon. Come back in a week and it has changed.
Product cards follow two rules. Garments sit on a soft cream plate. Model and sticker shots sit in a night scene.
Product photography
47 photos, redone without a photo shoot.
I restyled every product photo in the store, 47 across 10 products. The holiday shots came out, and so did 9 duplicates.
Each model and sticker shot was cut out cleanly and set against a real starfield with a moon render from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio. Every photo got its own moon phase and position, then a layer of film grain so it reads as one photograph and not a collage.
All of it went in through the Shopify Admin API, so variant images, photo order and alt text stayed attached to the right products.
After
After
Under the hood
A theme built from scratch, and the parts nobody sees.
The theme
I designed and built the new site first, then ported it into a custom Shopify theme with its own layout and 18 sections and templates: home, shop, collections, product, cart, search, about, four service pages, the club page, contact, blog, articles, 404 and a coming-soon page.
It has a slide-out cart, product galleries that switch photos when you pick a color, collection tabs, and Shopify’s own contact and newsletter forms.
I built it on an unpublished copy, so the live store never broke. Becca published it with one click, and the old theme is still there as a rollback.
Search
Every page has its own title and description, including the ones Shopify leaves blank. The shop page went from “Products” to “Mental Health Merch: Tees, Hoodies & Stickers.”
Products carry Product, Offer and Breadcrumb data. Collections, the homepage and blog posts each have their own. Every page has a 1200×630 share card for link previews.
Cart and search pages are kept out of the index, old product URLs redirect, five store policies are written for how print-on-demand works, and Search Console is verified with the sitemap submitted.
Speed
Theme images went from 4.7 MB to 0.8 MB, resized to the size they display at and recompressed.
The old homepage pulled 2.2 MB of photos from Unsplash. Those are now self-hosted at 95 KB total.
After launch, a desktop lab test measured Largest Contentful Paint at about 1.5 seconds and layout shift at 0.00.
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| Theme | Stock Shopify “Showcase” | Custom theme, 18 sections and templates |
| Product photos | 56: stock, holiday flat-lays, duplicates | 47, all restyled, plus size guides |
| Product data for search | None | Product, Offer and Breadcrumb on all 10 products |
| Share image | None on most pages | A card on every page |
| Theme image weight | 4.7 MB | 0.8 MB |
| Homepage third-party images | 2.2 MB | 95 KB, self-hosted |
| Store policies | None | 5 published |
| Search Console | Not verified | Verified, sitemap submitted |
Also delivered
A new collection, and a way off Shopify.
A nine-piece collection in the same tattoo-flash style: designs, print-ready files and Printful products with real mockups, gathered into a lookbook PDF so Becca could approve every piece before it went on sale.
A standalone version of the site with Stripe checkout and Printful fulfillment, ready to deploy on Netlify, in case Belong ever wants to stop paying Shopify every month.
Where it landed
It finally looks like the art on the shirts.
Belong’s store now matches the brand, gives Google the product data it needs for rich results, and loads faster than the stock theme did with far more going on. Becca still makes changes in the Shopify editor she already knew.
Client: Belong Consulting, Denver, Colorado. Products fulfilled by Printful. Moon imagery: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio.
Selling something alongside the practice?
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