From a Buggy Storefront to a Custom Shopify Build for Velia Ring

Velia needed a storefront that matched the product. The brief covered three things: a complete redesign of the site, a way to bring their existing crowdfunding backers into Shopify as real customers with the right entitlements, and a proper account and profile flow so those customers had somewhere to land once they arrived.

Alongside that, the site had to hold up under launch traffic and be genuinely usable for a premium hardware brand, with heavy video, long form education content and a buying decision that takes more explanation than a typical ecommerce product.

The store they had was not fit for launch. It was buggy, the design did not reflect the quality of the product, and performance was poor across the board, particularly on mobile where most of their traffic sits. Small things broke in ways that undermined trust, and the overall impression was of a template rather than a brand that had spent years on research and engineering.

The bigger problem was structural. Their backers lived on a third party crowdfunding platform, completely separate from Shopify. There was no clean path to turn those people into Shopify customers with accounts, order history and the right access, and no profile flow waiting for them if there had been.

I rebuilt the Velia Ring storefront from the ground up rather than patching what was there. That covered the full front end design and build, custom sections throughout, and two pieces of custom development that were specific to how Velia had come to market: a backer import that upserted their crowdfunding backers into Shopify, and a customer profile flow built around it.

The site itself is heavily custom. Velia's story depends on explaining sensor technology, comfort and accuracy in a way that feels premium rather than technical, so a lot of the build went into bespoke content sections, video led layouts and product education that the team can update themselves without coming back to me.

• Full redesign and rebuild of the storefront, replacing a buggy template with a custom build

• Custom backer import that upserts records from their third party crowdfunding platform into Shopify, matching existing customers rather than creating duplicates

• Customer profile flow designed around that migration, so backers arrive to a working account rather than a blank one

• Custom video hero and content sections built to carry the brand story, including fixes for iOS specific video rendering issues that caused a visible flash on load

• Performance work across the site, with particular attention to how heavy video loads on mobile

• Product education and comparison content built as reusable sections the team can edit and reorder without developer help

Velia went from a storefront that was actively holding the brand back to a custom site that reflects the product, with their crowdfunding backers successfully brought across into Shopify as proper customers with working accounts and profiles.

The backer migration was the part that unlocked everything else. It removed the gap between where their earliest and most valuable customers actually lived and where the business needed them to be, and it did so without duplicate records or manual cleanup. On the front end, the team came away with a site they can run themselves, adding and rearranging sections for campaigns rather than queueing up developer work for every change.