Von Grundle's Workshop is a small ecommerce shop dealing in novelty curiosities — sarcophagi, shrouds, and assorted oddities — sold with tongue-in-cheek marketing copy on a Shopify storefront.
The problem
The existing store ran on a heavily modified commercial theme that had accumulated years of app bloat: review widgets, loyalty overlays, a live-chat bubble, and a currency converter nobody used. Mobile LCP was sitting at 6.2 seconds. The design didn't match the brand at all — Von Grundle's copy is darkly funny and theatrical, but the storefront looked like every other generic Shopify dropship template. Conversion rate on mobile was roughly half what it was on desktop, which pointed squarely at the experience rather than the product.
What I built
- Custom Liquid theme from scratch — no starter, no Dawn fork. Full control over every render path, which meant no dead JS and no unused CSS shipped to the browser.
- Dark Victorian design system — built around a tight type scale (two weights, one serif, nothing extra) and a restricted palette that matched the brand's existing packaging. The aesthetic needed to feel antique without being unreadable.
- Metafield-driven product lore — each product has a short "origin story" field that feeds into a custom section below the fold. Gives the brand personality without requiring a separate CMS integration.
- Section/block collection filtering — faceted filtering without an app dependency. Drops the request count by eliminating a round-trip to a third-party script host.
- Structured data for products and breadcrumbs — JSON-LD on every PDP for rich snippet eligibility. Small lift, measurable impact on click-through rate from organic search over the following quarter.
Post-launch, mobile LCP dropped to 1.8 seconds and the mobile-to-desktop conversion gap closed to within 12%.
What I learned
Building a theme from scratch is almost always worth it if the brand has a strong identity. Customizing a starter sounds faster until you spend four hours unraveling someone else's JavaScript to understand why a dropdown doesn't close on mobile. Starting from zero is slower for the first two days and faster for every day after.
Dark-mode-first design is genuinely harder than it sounds. Contrast ratios shift in ways that look fine in Figma and feel wrong on an OLED screen at night. Budget extra time for accessibility passes — I ran the site through WCAG 2.1 AA checks three times before I was satisfied.
The biggest surprise: organic traffic responded faster than expected to the structured data changes. Within six weeks the product listings were showing price and availability in Google SERPs. It's not a shortcut, but it's a lever most Shopify themes leave on the table.