Turtlebox: Custom Shopify theme

The old theme did the basics, but it was generic. A brand with this much personality (adventure, loud music, life outdoors) was living in a store that could have belonged to anyone. The brand's values were left at the door.

• Slow store performance: Product pages were taking too long to load, and every second counts.
• Weak brand presence: The Turtlebox brand wasn’t consistently visible across screens.
• Products not prominent enough: The layout failed to keep products front and centre for shoppers.

Instead of bending an off-the-shelf theme, we chose to build a custom one. That way every section earns its place, and the store doesn't load code it never uses, which pays off directly in speed.

We started with the brand. Turtlebox's type, colours and laid-back voice became the foundation of the design, not a finishing touch. Then we designed sections around the products: how to show four different speakers, their colours and features, without wearing visitors out.

We received Turtlebox’s designs and focused solely on implementing them in the Shopify theme, ensuring a faithful, high-performance build.

A Shopify theme built from scratch, with dedicated sections that put the products in the spotlight: a video hero, a speaker collection with colour swatches, feature blocks, and room for ambassadors and brand stories. Everything is editable in the Shopify editor, so the Turtlebox team can create and change pages without waiting on us.

The toughest piece was the product customizer. Customers choose a base colour, a colour for the handle, feet or bumper (depending on the model), and can add a monogram of up to three characters. With every choice, the speaker image updates in real time, front and back.

The challenge was keeping it fast and reliable: lots of possible combinations, images that have to appear without lag, and the right configuration carried through to the cart and the order.

Every section was also designed for mobile, with simple navigation and easy-to-tap buttons.

• Product customization

  We created an interface to customize each piece with your initials and choose from a range of colors to create a product that feels uniquely yours.

We work with Shopify's GitHub integration. The new theme lived on a development branch connected to a preview theme in the store, where we ran full QA (pages, customizer, cart and mobile) without touching the live store. Once everything checked out, we published. It took 3 to 4 weeks from kick-off to launch, and the switch was smooth for both the team and their customers.

1. Week 3 · Testing & QA

   The entire website was reviewed and tested.

2. Go live

   The launch was very smooth

3. After launch · Support

   Monitoring, fixes and all the new improvements