Elevation107
A 3,000-product snowboard store, built from scratch and kept selling through peak season.
- Role
- Sole developer, built from scratch
- Market
- Australia, shipping Australia-wide
- Stack
- Shopify (Athens theme, Liquid), Globo filters, Klaviyo, Judge.me, Zip, PayPal
The situation
An Australian snowboard shop carrying Burton, Union, Capita, Jones, Oakley and 30 more brands.
Snowboard gear comes in sizes, widths, colours and genders, and buyers shop by all of them. Nearly a whole year of sales lands in a few winter months, so the store has to work perfectly in July and still pay its way the rest of the year.
What I built
- The whole store: theme setup and customisation, every page, the catalog and the navigation.
- A catalog of 3,055 products and 8,608 variants from 37 brands, in 215 collections.
- A mega menu split by men, women and kids across boards, bindings and boots; outerwear and layers; goggles and protection. Each column has its own sale link.
- Collection pages with a filter sidebar and sorting, so buyers can narrow 500 goggles down to their size and lens.
- An off-season line of outdoor and indoor games, like bocce, croquet, Finska, Kubb and darts, so the store sells in summer too.
- Bundle deals, e-gift cards, a countdown timer for sales, a brand strip, reviews, email signup, and Zip and PayPal at checkout.
What was hard
The sidebar vanished overnight
One morning the filter sidebar was gone from every collection in the mega menu, and nobody had touched the site. A library update had broken a theme file. I copied the theme to my own store and fixed it there, so the live site never went down. It shipped the next day.
Empty shelves in the busiest month
In July every collection suddenly showed zero products, while Shopify still showed the stock. Shopify support blamed the theme, and the theme's developer blamed the filter app, which had replaced the theme's product grid. I didn't wait on either of them. I brought back the products, then the sidebar, the filters and the sorting, all inside peak season.