Hobby Workshop
Long-term Magento, Hyvä and ecommerce consultancy for a growing UK hobby retailer.
Barbone
Migrating an established barbering brand to Shopify
Barbone is an award-winning barbering business founded in St Albans by Sam Campagna. I designed and developed a new Shopify storefront for the brand, migrating the ecommerce experience from its previous platform onto a cleaner and more maintainable foundation.
Client overview
Barbone is an award-winning barbering business founded in St Albans by Sam Campagna, with a brand built around craftsmanship, experience and a strong sense of community.
Sam has spent close to three decades in the barbering industry, with work featured in GQ, Modern Barber Magazine and BarberEVO alongside collaborations with photographer Rankin.
That reputation meant the ecommerce experience needed to feel considered and confident without competing with the personality and visual identity of the wider Barbone brand.
Project overview & objectives
The project involved moving Barbone away from its existing ecommerce platform and onto Shopify, alongside the design and development of a new storefront.
The objective was to simplify the underlying ecommerce platform while creating a customer-facing experience that better reflected the quality and established identity of the business.
Shopify migration
Moving the store onto a simpler ecommerce platform
The existing ecommerce setup was replaced with Shopify, giving Barbone a more straightforward foundation for managing the storefront and its ongoing ecommerce requirements.
The migration was approached as more than simply transferring content from one system to another. The existing experience was reviewed alongside the requirements of the new store so the move could also improve how the customer journey was structured.
My Shopify development work covered the implementation of the new storefront and the transition away from the previous platform, creating a cleaner technical base for the business going forward.
UX, UI & theme development
Translating an established brand into ecommerce
Barbone already had a strong identity rooted in craft, heritage and the personality of the business, so the design work focused on translating that identity into an ecommerce experience rather than creating a new brand around the platform.
The Shopify theme was developed to keep the interface clear and restrained, allowing imagery, content and products to do most of the visual work.
The result is a storefront that feels connected to the wider Barbone brand while giving the business the usability and maintainability benefits of Shopify underneath.
The outcome
A more focused foundation for ecommerce
Moving Barbone onto Shopify provided the business with a simpler ecommerce platform while giving the customer-facing store a clearer visual and structural foundation.
The project is a good example of where platform choice should reflect the needs of the business rather than adding unnecessary technical complexity.
For Barbone, the priority was a well-designed, maintainable storefront capable of supporting the brand and its ecommerce requirements without the overhead of a more complex platform.
