The Challenge
A Beautiful Homepage Mockup — With No Way to Build It, Maintain It, or Trust the Deploys
SunHeist Eyewear knew exactly what they wanted their store to look like. They’d designed an “after” mockup for a homepage that would sell their polarized frames the right way — organized by how people actually use them: driving, water and fishing, sport, travel, and everyday. What they didn’t have was a way to turn that design into a real, working Shopify storefront.
The gaps ran deeper than the homepage. Merchandising sections like Best Sellers would have to be updated by hand every time a product changed. Their reviews were mid-migration from Judge.me to Loox and at real risk of being lost or stranded. Small but revenue-affecting bugs were live on the site — mismatched free-shipping thresholds, a floating “Shop with AI” widget, and stray product variants leaking into the storefront. And the theme itself was fragile: a single bad deploy could silently wipe live landing pages with no way to get them back.
They didn’t need a template. They needed an engineer inside their theme.
The Solution
Custom Shopify Engineering — Built to Match the Design, Run Itself, and Never Break on Deploy
We went into the SunHeist theme and built their vision for real — section by section, in custom Liquid, matched to the mockup down to the icons, colors, and animations. But looking right was only half the job. We engineered the store so it maintains itself where it should, protects the data that matters, and can’t be taken down by a routine deploy.
Every workstream came back to the same principle: give SunHeist a storefront that’s as reliable and low-maintenance behind the scenes as it is polished up front.
What We Built
Four Workstreams That Turned the Mockup Into a Reliable, Self-Running Store
A Custom, Metafield-Driven Homepage
We built four custom homepage sections from scratch to match SunHeist’s design: a hero slideshow with a trust-bar overlay, gold-star proof line, and free-shipping messaging; a “Find the Right Pair” category-tile row; a “Polarization Built In” feature band; and a Best Sellers section with pill badges and a “Best for:” line. The Best Sellers cards pull everything — badge label, color, “best for,” links, variant image, and price — straight from metafields, so the store updates itself instead of being maintained by hand. We assembled the full homepage layout and applied several rounds of client refinements until every icon, color, and scroll animation matched the vision exactly.
Collection-First Navigation
We rebuilt the header into a clean, single-line navigation where each category — Best Sellers, Driving, Water & Fishing, Sport, Travel & Hiking, Everyday — links directly to its collection page instead of hiding behind dropdowns, with matching thumbnail navigation in the mobile drawer. Shoppers get to the right frames in one tap.
A Zero-Data-Loss Reviews Migration
The trickiest piece: moving reviews from Judge.me to Loox without losing a single one. We diagnosed that the import had stranded reviews on draft product handles, produced cleanup files to resolve duplicates and orphans, and restored the full review count. Per the owner’s direction, we implemented consistent store-wide ratings across the frame lineup, traced the headline rating to its correct source, and eliminated duplicate card ratings.
Store Hardening & Deploy Safety
We cleaned up the details that quietly cost sales and confidence: corrected the free-shipping threshold sitewide (and caught a hidden cart-bar mismatch working against their marketing), pinned the floating “Shop with AI” widget into place, and hid stray prescription-form variants from the storefront, cart, and product options. When a routine deploy deleted the store’s Instant landing pages, we restored every affected file, verified with a full theme-wide diff that nothing else was touched, and added safeguards so it can never happen again.
The Result
A Storefront That Matches the Vision — and Runs Itself
SunHeist Eyewear now has the store they designed: a fully custom, on-brand homepage that sells frames by how customers actually use them, navigation that gets shoppers to the right pair in one tap, and a reviews system that shows consistent, trustworthy social proof. Behind the scenes, the Best Sellers section maintains itself from metafields, the review data is intact and protected, and the theme is hardened so a bad deploy can’t take the site offline. It’s a storefront that’s as dependable under the hood as it is polished on the surface.
