Sports and fitness. Shopify for brands that serve more than one channel.

At first glance a sports store looks like a fashion store: sizes, colours, collections. The difference lies in the channels and in the product. Sports brands often sell to consumers, business customers and through marketplaces at the same time, and their products carry performance features that have to be understandable and filterable in the store.

On top of that there is a community waiting for launches. New colours, limited editions or collaborations with athletes create a lot of traffic in a short time. A setup that runs well day to day also has to stay stable on those days and must not lose any orders.

That is why we do not start with the design, but with the question of which channels the store has to carry and which system owns which data. Only then do we decide on theme, apps and page types. That was the same starting point at SMILODOX and MYCR7, with very different answers.

Many brands run their wholesale business in a second store, a portal or by email and spreadsheet. That doubles maintenance, content and sources of error. Shopify Plus lets you serve consumers and business customers in one store, with their own prices, terms and areas for retailers.

At SMILODOX we did exactly that. It started with an analysis of the existing store, an app audit and a shared target picture for B2C, B2B and maintenance later on. The design workshop produced Brand Guidelines and Brand Layers that define how campaign, category, product and B2B communication look.

The B2B area got its own frame without building a second design system. Homepage, collection page, product page and B2B area were set up as frameworks in Figma and then built on Shopify Plus. At SMILODOX, two months passed from kickoff to go-live.

If you have sold through specialist retail and marketplaces so far, you hand over margin, customer data and brand presence. Your own D2C channel brings that back without putting the existing channels at risk. What matters is that Shopify is connected as a sales channel and does not become a second owner of stock and prices.

At MYCR7 that was exactly the task. The store went live for the EU and Switzerland at the same time, with EUR and CHF and separate tax logic through Shopify Markets. Stock and orders come from a proprietary ERP, alongside Klaviyo flows and server-side tracking.

The MYCR7 channel went live after six weeks. Across all channels, revenue afterwards was 120 per cent higher than before. That is not an isolated store effect but a before and after comparison including the new D2C channel, and that is exactly how it is stated in the case study.

The platform itself is rarely the problem. Shopify scales delivery, but apps, scripts and integrations do not do so automatically. If every product page loads extra widgets during a launch, or the ERP only reports stock once a minute, the drop turns into a support case.

Before large campaigns we check what loads on the affected pages, how fast stock arrives from the system that owns it and what happens when something oversells. Campaign pages are built from theme sections, so the team can create them without developers and only has to publish on launch day.

After the launch, what counts is what was measured. Server-side tracking keeps campaigns measurable even when browsers and consent choices cut off signals. That way you can decide which campaign really brought revenue and which only brought traffic.

Breathable, compressive, squat-proof, quick-drying: sports products are bought on properties, not just on colour and size. As long as this information sits as running text in the product description, no filter, no search and no AI assistant can read it reliably.

We set up performance features, use case, material and fit as structured metafields. From these come filters on the collection page, comparison details on the product page and clean product data for Google and AI search. The effort lies in agreeing on terms, not in the technology.

Fit is a point of its own. Compression wear, leggings and running shoes fit differently depending on the model. Fit notes belong on the individual product, not in a general size chart, otherwise questions and returns go up.

Sports brands live on images, athletes and stories from training. That tempts you to bring every idea into the store as its own module or its own app. After a few campaigns the theme is heavy, slow and can only be maintained by developers.

At SMILODOX we therefore defined Brand Layers first: which layer is campaign, which is category, which is product. From that came reusable modules the team can combine on its own. That leaves room for the brand world without every campaign becoming a development project.