Lucy & Yak: Component-Based Content for a Shopify Rebuild

Client

Lucy & Yak, a values-led, gender-neutral fashion brand known for its dungarees and its strong sustainability and community ethos. The work was delivered through Absurd, a digital agency, as a full design and build of the brand's customer-facing Shopify commerce store.

The brief

The existing lucyandyak.com needed rebuilding to improve customer experience, site speed, and ultimately conversion. The brand had grown quickly, and the site carried the legacy of that growth: a fragmented set of plugins and apps, inconsistent content structures, and a front end that wasn't serving the brand's distinctive voice or its customers' shopping behaviour.

The rebuild moved the store onto Shopify's Online Store 2.0 architecture using the Dawn theme framework, with its JSON templates, modular sections, and native metafields. This was a shift from a page-bound site to a component-based, structured-content approach.

Approach

My focus was the content layer: how content would be structured, modelled, and made manageable by the brand's own editors after launch.

The work began with discovery. We reviewed the existing technical stack and the full set of Shopify apps powering the store, from search and product recommendations to reviews, wishlists, stock notifications, and loyalty. Each was assessed against a clear question: does this serve customer experience and conversion, or is it adding weight without value? The app audit produced specific recommendations: replace some (search moving to a more customisable, customer-tracking solution; product recommendations rebuilt for editorial control), retain and re-implement others through their APIs for performance, and remove those that Shopify 2.0's native functionality now made redundant.

The content modelling sat at the heart of the build. Working component by component rather than page by page, we defined the structured content for each part of the store: the home page modules, collection pages, product pages, content sections, and blog. Each component was specified with its content fields, image aspect ratios, and acceptance criteria, then documented as user stories for the development team. Where components were reused across templates, we modelled them once and composed them flexibly, which is the core efficiency of a component-based approach.

A guiding principle throughout was editor empowerment. Shopify 2.0's metafields and section architecture meant the brand's content editors could reorganise, add, hide, and customise content blocks without developer intervention. Hero messaging, collection grids, navigation, and product information could all be managed in the back office. The content model had to be structured enough to stay coherent and flexible enough to let a non-technical team run the store day to day.

Content also had to carry the brand's voice. The size guidance and fit recommendation content, for example, was flagged for revision to align with Lucy & Yak's gender-neutral point of view, because structured content at scale still has to sound like the brand at every touchpoint.

Outcomes

The rebuild delivered a component-based store on a modern, performance-focused architecture, with a content model that gave the brand's own team control over the experience. The structured approach meant content could be reused across the site and managed without code changes, reducing the brand's reliance on developer time for routine content work.

The component-by-component method also created a reusable structure: a documented set of content models and acceptance criteria that supported consistent delivery and could flex as the store evolved through later phases of work.

Reflection

This project is a clear example of why composable and component-based thinking matters for commerce. The hard part wasn't designing beautiful pages. It was structuring content as reusable, channel-independent components that a non-technical team could manage confidently, while keeping the brand's distinctive voice intact across every module. Get the content model right and the store becomes flexible, fast, and sustainable. Get it wrong and you've simply rebuilt the old problem with newer tools.