A brand, a store and a launch system.
Collectibility Shop started with 2 shirts on Etsy. We built the brand identity, a custom Shopify store and the workflow behind it, all from a blank page.
The brief
Collectibility Shop is our own brand: graphic tees for people who carry their culture to the ballpark, the backyard and the block. It began on Etsy, which is convenient, but not very flexible. Etsy owns the customer, the email list and most of how the brand shows up.
We wanted all three back, and we wanted to learn Shopify properly by building a store on top of a site made from scratch.
What we built
A brand kit first
A distressed wordmark, a four-icon culture code (Los Angeles, Baseball, Music, Pop Culture), a cream, black, ravine blue and terracotta palette, and a written guide that keeps every surface looking like one brand.
A custom Shopify theme
Hand-built, not a purchased template: hero, ticker, culture code, featured drops, product pages with color and size pickers, and the cart. The type does the talking.
Printify behind two storefronts
Printify is connected to both Shopify and Etsy. Each order is printed and shipped to the customer, so the shop carries no inventory.
A repeatable launch system
Every tee needs print files, product photos and listing copy for Shopify and Etsy. One workflow now covers all of it. Eleven tees are live, with more in the queue.
How it got here
The first version of the site linked every product out to Etsy. Building it made the gap obvious: without a cart and checkout of our own there was no customer journey to design and no email list to own.
So we rebuilt it with Shopify as the backend, working in staging first. The store went live in October 2026.
Decisions worth explaining
The icon box is a rule
Culture-code icons always sit in hard-edged boxes, never floating. One small rule keeps the site and the tees looking like the same brand.
Mockups show what ships
We never ask an image model to draw the print. It garbles lettering, and Etsy requires mockups to match the product. Photos are generated blank, then the real artwork is composited on.
Names stay out of titles
If a phrase belongs to a song, band, team or person, the default is to keep it out of titles, tags and search copy.
Four systems, one set of promises
Printify, Shopify, Etsy and the site each have their own shipping and policy settings, and a customer should never meet two answers. We wrote the policies once (made to order, printed in two to five business days, replacements for misprints, no returns on size) and made every platform say the same thing.
The shipping hand-off bug
Several shipping options at similar prices were being handed off inconsistently between Printify, Shopify and the storefront. Because the options were so close, the mismatch was easy to miss and took real time and effort to isolate.
The result
A store that is entirely ours: our brand, our checkout and our customer list, with Etsy still running beside it. The system that launched the first eleven tees launches the next one.
Selling something?
Tell us what you sell and where it sells today. We'll tell you what we'd build first.