A Mobile Ecommerce Site for Purpose Driven Retailer
Deso Supply Co. is a California outdoor brand named for Desolation Wilderness — a high-SKU apparel manufacturer with hundreds of variants across seasons and a fanbase that lives in the cuts they make. We rebuilt the Shopify storefront for mobile-first conversion, designed a system of seasonal Tear Sheets that became the brand's editorial voice, and embellished those same Tear Sheet illustrations directly onto the clothing — turning a marketing asset into the product itself.
Live since 2023
A high-SKU outdoor brand whose storefront couldn’t keep up with the cut count.
Deso Supply Co. makes apparel inspired by Desolation Wilderness — the granite-and-pine backcountry of the California Sierras. The line had grown the way the best outdoor brands do: a tee here, a hoodie there, then a hat, then a flannel, then a season-specific jacket, until the catalog had hundreds of SKUs across colorways, sizes, and weight grades. The fanbase was real — Deso was being worn at trailheads, at college campuses, and at coffee shops in mountain towns up and down the West Coast.
The storefront couldn’t keep up. The original Shopify theme was built for a 30-product brand and the catalog had outgrown it five times over. Mobile shoppers — the majority of Deso’s traffic — were dropping at filter pages because variant selection had turned into a four-tap maze. PDPs loaded slowly because every theme block was rendering for products that no longer existed in the season. And the brand voice that worked on Instagram (editorial, seasonal, location-led) was nowhere to be found on the site itself.
The brief was rebuild for the catalog Deso actually has. Modernize the Shopify storefront with mobile-first conversion as the gating metric. Build an editorial brand voice that scaled across 800+ SKUs without becoming a CMS chore. And — the unexpected ask — design a system of seasonal Tear Sheets, in-house style, that could function as both press-kit assets and as the literal artwork screen-printed onto the next season’s clothing line. Marketing collateral that became the product.
Rebuild for the catalog. Then make the brand assets wearable.
Mobile-first storefront, rebuilt for high SKU.
Custom Shopify theme tuned for the realities of a 800+ SKU outdoor catalog: aggressive collection-page filtering (size, colorway, weight, season), one-tap variant selection on PDP, sticky add-to-cart for browsers who already know the cut, and a checkout optimized for mobile thumbs. Mobile became the conversion engine, not the consolation prize.
Performance engineering for an apparel catalog at scale.
Reworked the theme architecture so each PDP renders only the blocks it actually uses, lazy-loaded the variant-image swap, and pre-cached the top 80 SKUs at the edge. Result: 847 PDPs all loading under 1.5s, even on the high-photo PDPs that an apparel brand has to lead with.
Refreshed editorial brand voice for seasonal cadence.
Brand voice rebuilt for the seasonal release rhythm — copy templates for product launches, collection drops, and editorial blog content. The voice that already worked on Instagram (location-led, hands-on, never preachy) finally lived on the storefront too. Marketing now ships seasonal copy in hours instead of days.
A Tear Sheet system that became the brand’s editorial spine.
Designed a multi-season Tear Sheet system — flat-lay editorial layouts of products with location context, custom illustration, and hand-drawn typography. Used initially as press-kit assets and retail-buyer collateral. Each season got 8-12 sheets. The system was modular so the in-house team could extend it without rebuilding the visual identity every release.
Tear Sheet illustrations embellished onto the clothing line.
The unexpected payoff. The Tear Sheet illustrations — the location maps, the product callouts, the hand-typography — got screen-printed and embroidered onto the next season's clothing line. A Tear Sheet stopped being a marketing asset and became the artwork on the back of a hoodie, the patch on a hat, the embroidery on a flannel sleeve. Marketing collateral that was the product.
A merchandising system that drove AOV through bundles.
Built bundle merchandising into the storefront — outfit-builder modules on collection pages, "complete the kit" upsells on PDPs, seasonal collection landing pages that grouped products by activity instead of by category. The result: AOV went from a typical apparel single-item sale up to a 2.4-piece average across the year.
The Tear Sheets weren’t a campaign anymore — they became the line. We screen-printed our own editorial onto the back of a hoodie, and that was the season’s bestseller.
Engagement summary · Deso Supply Co. × Commence Studio
Numbers that matter for a high-SKU outdoor brand.
Storefront, Tear Sheets, and the line — in production.
The Tear Sheets weren't a campaign anymore — they became the line. We screen-printed our own editorial onto the back of a hoodie, and that was the season's bestseller.
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What you walk away with
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- ✓Three phased options — minimum, considered, comprehensive
- ✓Sized investments and timelines, no aspirational ranges
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