TL;DR: Gymshark runs its ecommerce storefront on Shopify Plus. This case study covers Liquid Lemon's work rebuilding the Gymshark storefront experience, including product pages, collections, navigation, cart, and performance. The biggest challenge was making a large apparel catalog easier to browse without sacrificing speed or mobile usability.
Does Gymshark use Shopify?
Yes. Gymshark uses Shopify Plus for its ecommerce storefront. Shopify Plus provides the commerce infrastructure underneath the store; the customer-facing experience can still be custom designed and developed around the brand, catalog, merchandising strategy, and conversion requirements.
This Gymshark Shopify case study focuses on that storefront layer: the product experience, collection architecture, navigation, cart, and performance work behind a high-volume custom Shopify Plus build.
What was the Gymshark Shopify project?
Gymshark is a global fitness apparel brand with a large catalog spanning men's, women's, and accessories lines.
Liquid Lemon's work focused on rebuilding and reorganizing the Shopify Plus storefront rather than applying cosmetic changes to an existing theme. The project covered the homepage, collection experience, product pages, navigation, and cart, with the deepest work concentrated in three places: product discovery, product detail pages, and storefront performance.
At this scale, the storefront has to solve two problems at once: make a large catalog feel simple to shop while keeping the experience fast enough that additional merchandising and functionality do not create unnecessary friction.
What was the core problem?
Findability and catalog sprawl. Gymshark did not have a traffic problem. The challenge was helping shoppers move through a large product catalog quickly enough to reach the right product without excessive browsing.
As ecommerce catalogs expand, navigation designed for a smaller assortment can become harder to use. More collections, product types, filters, and merchandising rules increase the number of decisions a shopper has to make before reaching a product.
That is the same structural problem we cover in our guide to outgrowing a Shopify theme, executed here at a much larger catalog scale.
What did we change in the Gymshark Shopify redesign?
The storefront was rebuilt around three priorities: clearer product pages, stronger collection architecture, and leaner performance.
1. Rebuilt the product detail pages
We redesigned the product detail page experience around the decisions an apparel shopper needs to make before adding an item to cart.
Fit, fabric, sizing, imagery, variant selection, and the primary purchase action were organized into a clearer hierarchy, with particular attention to the mobile experience.
The objective was simple: reduce the amount of searching a shopper has to do inside the PDP before deciding whether the product is right for them.
2. Restructured the collection architecture
We reorganized how products were presented across Gymshark's collection experience so shoppers could move from a broad category to a relevant subset of products with less friction.
The work included collection grouping, filtering, search behavior, and navigation across a large assortment.
For a high-SKU apparel brand, information architecture is part of the shopping experience. A product can have a strong PDP and still underperform if shoppers struggle to find it.
3. Optimized storefront performance
We also worked across the theme to reduce unnecessary page weight, improve asset delivery, and limit code that delayed rendering.
Performance matters most when it is treated as an architectural constraint rather than a cleanup task after the design is finished. Large catalogs, media-heavy product pages, apps, and merchandising features all add weight unless the storefront is built with that complexity in mind.
For more on the relationship between ecommerce performance and conversion, see our guide to Shopify speed optimization and conversion.
What did the rebuild deliver?
The result was a cleaner Shopify Plus storefront built around faster product discovery, clearer product pages, and a performance-conscious architecture.
| Area | What changed |
|---|---|
| Product Detail Pages | Rebuilt around clearer information hierarchy, product evaluation, variant selection, and the purchase action |
| Catalog Navigation | Restructured collections, search, navigation, and filtering across a large assortment |
| Storefront Performance | Reduced unnecessary page weight and optimized asset delivery across the custom storefront |
The PDP sat at the center of the project because it is where browsing intent becomes purchase intent. Navigation gets the shopper there; the product page has to make the decision easy.
That is also why we treat PDP hierarchy, mobile usability, merchandising, and performance as one system rather than separate CRO tasks. See our breakdown of Shopify conversion rate optimization mistakes for the common ways those elements break down.
Why did this project take longer than a standard sprint?
Catalog volume and organizational complexity.
Liquid Lemon's standard storefront process is structured around a 30-day sprint, but a large catalog can create additional work that has little to do with visual design: collection architecture, product organization, content population, merchandising rules, and QA all scale with the amount of store data involved.
Gymshark required a longer execution window because of that catalog and organizational scope. The important part was defining that scope before the build rather than allowing it to emerge as uncontrolled scope creep during development.
For a smaller-store comparison, see our custom Shopify storefront case study for a beverage brand. For a longer-term growth engagement, see our Triangl Shopify growth case study.
What can other DTC brands learn from the Gymshark Shopify build?
- Information architecture is part of conversion. Navigation, collections, search, and filters determine how quickly shoppers reach products worth evaluating.
- PDP hierarchy matters more as catalogs grow. The more choice a brand offers, the more clearly each product page has to communicate fit, differences, and purchase information.
- Performance needs to be designed into the storefront. Apps, media, merchandising, and custom features all create performance cost unless the theme architecture accounts for them.
- Catalog complexity changes project scope. A custom storefront for 30 products and a custom storefront for hundreds of products may use similar design principles but require very different amounts of structuring and QA.
Who designed and built Gymshark's Shopify store?
Liquid Lemon designed and developed the rebuild of Gymshark's Shopify Plus storefront, a full custom build covering product pages, collections, navigation, cart, and performance, with every page custom-coded rather than assembled from a theme.
What agency does Gymshark use for its Shopify site?
Gymshark's Shopify Plus storefront rebuild was handled by Liquid Lemon, a Shopify Plus design and development studio for DTC and CPG brands, known for custom storefronts for brands like Gymshark, Olipop, and Hero Cosmetics. Liquid Lemon works as a Shopify Plus agency for growing DTC and CPG brands.
Ready for your own custom Shopify Plus storefront?
Liquid Lemon designs and develops custom Shopify storefronts for growing DTC brands through a fixed-scope process.
If your catalog has outgrown your existing theme, explore our Shopify Plus agency work or start your project with Liquid Lemon.
Written by Andrew Zam, Co-founder of Liquid Lemon, a Shopify / Shopify Plus design + development studio for DTC brands.
