The Stripes Company

Cut from the Same Cloth — Rebuilt on Shopify

Who

The Stripes Company came to us via Bark, a UK-founded striped fabric specialist, established in 2007 as a modern tribute to the classic deckchair stripe. Designed in-house and produced with long-standing trusted suppliers, the brand offers woven striped textiles and lifestyle products for the home, beach and garden, serving both consumers and trade customers worldwide. The business remains intentionally small and streamlined, operating primarily online, with a factory outlet near Chester.

What

Years of organic growth had left The Stripes Company running four regional sites, each with its own quirks, overheads, and content drift. The catalogue was complex: 300 to 400 SKUs, multiple fabric widths, lengths, trims, and materials, plus a trade customer base that needed a different pricing and checkout experience from retail shoppers. They needed a full rebuild that: Consolidated the four regional sites into one internationalised Shopify store Made the buying experience clearer for both retail and trade customers Preserved years of SEO equity through a careful migration Supported the way people actually buy custom fabric Respected the brand's heritage while bringing the online experience properly up to date

The project included:

Trade login, net pricing, custom shipping thresholds, and manual invoicing tools built from scratch

POS integration unifying online and in-store inventory

Four regional sites consolidated into one internationalised Shopify store 300 to 400 SKUs migrated with complex variant logic for fabric, trim, length, and material

Full SEO migration with redirects, schema, and metadata to protect organic equity

How

We started with discovery. Sitemap workshops, competitor benchmarking, customer journey mapping, and a review of the existing analytics gave us a clear view of where the friction was and where the opportunity sat. From there, UX and design reimagined the brand online. The UX work came first: customer journey mapping, navigation testing, and prototyping the awkward flows like sample ordering and trade checkout before any visual design was locked in. That groundwork is what separates a store that converts from one that just looks the part, and it shaped every decision that followed. Dual navigation logic was built in from the start, so customers could browse by fabric or by product without compromise. The team explored multiple homepage directions and landed on a clean, fabric-first concept, paired with an illustrative mega menu and the deckchair re-canvas slider that had become a signature of the brand. A full UI kit was delivered to keep future development consistent. Development covered the technical work that makes a store like this actually function: Custom variant logic for fabric width, length, material, and trim Sample swatch functionality with automatic discount and shipping rules, capped to keep margins protected A trade customer experience with tagged accounts, net pricing, custom shipping thresholds, and manual post-order invoicing POS integration to unify online and in-store inventory in real time iContact email marketing integration with welcome and post-purchase automations Royal Mail and Transglobal fulfilment integration for automated label generation International tax and shipping are configured across the UK, US, and Australia, with the framework in place to add more regions Reviews integration, related products, upsell logic, and bundle support Full SEO migration: redirect mapping, schema, metadata, image optimisation, and a Search Console–ready setup to protect organic traffic through the move Blog content, FAQs, and the legacy informational pages were migrated with structure preserved and internal linking tightened up. The catalogue was rebuilt from the ground up rather than imported as-is, giving the team a cleaner foundation to grow from.