Nomad Collective
E-commerce & Editorial Platform
Editorial-driven e-commerce experience for a sustainable travel brand. Custom Shopify theme with scroll-driven storytelling and immersive product pages.
Nomad Collective sells premium sustainable travel gear — bags, apparel, and accessories made from recycled ocean plastic and deadstock fabrics. Their brand story is powerful, but their Shopify store looked like every other DTC brand: a hero banner, a product grid, and a footer. The conversion rate was solid at 2.8%, but the average order value was low because customers weren't discovering the full range.
They wanted an editorial-driven experience that made browsing feel like reading a travel magazine — where product discovery happened through storytelling, not just filters and grids.
I redesigned the information architecture around "journeys" rather than categories. Instead of navigating to "Bags" or "Apparel," users enter themed collections like "Urban Transit" or "Mountain & Coast." Each journey combines editorial content, styled photography, and shoppable product placements in a single scroll experience.
The technical challenge was building this within Shopify's ecosystem. I created custom Liquid templates with a section schema that lets the content team build new journeys without developer help. Each section — hero, editorial block, product spotlight, parallax image, pull quote — is a reusable module with configurable spacing, color, and layout options.
The homepage sets the tone. A full-viewport hero with a slow Ken Burns zoom transitions into a mission statement that reveals word-by-word as you scroll. Product "spotlights" use a parallax technique where the product image stays pinned while descriptive text scrolls past it — creating a sense of depth and focus.
Each product detail page follows a magazine layout: a full-bleed lifestyle image, then specs and materials in a structured grid, followed by "In the Field" — editorial images of the product in actual use, shot in the locations that inspired the collection. The buy button is always accessible via a sticky footer on mobile.
The checkout flow was completely rebuilt to reduce friction. I implemented a slide-out cart, eliminated the cart page entirely, and added a "Complete the Journey" upsell section that suggests items from the same collection context the customer was browsing. This single change increased average order value by 22%.
"Ram turned our store into a destination. Customers tell us they browse even when they're not planning to buy — which means they always end up buying."
Conversion rate increased from 2.8% to 3.9%. Average order value jumped 22%. But the metric the founders cared about most was time on site — it went from 1:45 to 4:12 average session duration. People were reading, exploring, and engaging with the brand story in a way the old grid layout never encouraged.
The custom Shopify theme has been so successful that two other DTC brands in their investor's portfolio have asked for similar implementations.
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