Tilly Sveaas

Our main focus was:

• A bold, brand-led design that finally matched the jewellery.
• The Charm Studio: a build-your-own-necklace configurator, fully native to Shopify.
• Editorial freedom: full content and merchandising control for a non-technical team.
• B2B on Shopify Plus, without a separate build.
• A clean migration from WooCommerce, with the live store trading throughout.

The Charm Studio: A Configurator That Stays Native

The Charm Studio, a build-your-own-necklace experience, is the centrepiece of the new store. A customer picks a chain, adds connectors and charms, arranges everything in a live 2D drag-and-drop preview, and drops the finished piece into the cart as a single line.

↑ The Charm Studio, live 2D drag-and-drop preview

A data-modelling problem at its core

Product configurators are, at their core, a data modelling problem. Get the model wrong, and every new product or rule turns into a rebuild. Get it right, and everything above it follows.

Native, not outsourced

The usual way to get that data is an external configurator provider, an app or database that takes the problem off your hands, along with the data itself. Rendering moves client-side, slower and harder for search engines and AI assistants to read. The brand's product logic gets tied to someone else's data model. And the limitations grow the moment you want to extend the experience. For a brand set on owning its data and extending the experience, that trade rarely pays off: the configurator costs more, runs slower, breaks more often, and never quite fits the brand's needs.

We went the other way and modelled everything in Shopify Metaobjects, fully native. Because the data lives where Shopify expects it, everything the platform ships just works: discounting policies apply normally, dynamic bundles turn the finished necklace into a single line item, and cart and checkout behave as they always do. Nothing to work around.

A lightweight editor for a complex model

That choice left us with one problem. Raw Metaobjects are hard to edit. Nobody should be hand-typing the position and rotation where one image attaches to the next. We split the complex data structure from the editorial experience and built a lightweight custom app, tailored to the brand's business, that edits the Metaobjects under the hood. The team uploads assets, defines which products connect to which, and drops the pinpoints visually, never touching the structure underneath. Running it costs under $10 a month.

Built to extend

That structure pays off every time the configurator needs to change. Because the logic lives in the data, not the design, a change is an edit, not a rebuild: new attachment rules, new filtering, even a whole new product type. It's a matter of days, not a project.

Bold Design: Character Over Minimalism

The brand's brief put it plainly: the old site felt only functional when it needed to be inspirational as well. Tilly Sveaas customers buy into a world, a real founder, her story, her taste, and the website wasn't conveying this message.

So we built the new design from the brand's own DNA. It's driven first by typography: ABC Gaisyr Mono, reflecting the brand's character, paired with editorial layouts that set the site apart. The T-bar runs through everything as a motif: a small, powerful symbol, and more subtly in whole sections laid out in a T-shape. Collection pages open with clean product cards, then give way to editorial moments, down to sketches and drawings of the jewellery that show the craft behind each piece. Product pages centre on a full-screen rotating gallery with the buying options blended into it rather than boxed beside it. And "Shop the Look", the experience the brand most wanted customers drawn to, places each piece in context, with the story told around it.

Boldness never came at the price of usability: clear navigation, legible typography, a simple path to checkout. The result is a site that finally matches the quality of what it sells.

Editorial Freedom: A Store the Team Runs Themselves

Back to the problem the brand lived with daily. The old store was difficult to merchandise and slow to update, and WooCommerce's technical limits had hardened into operational bottlenecks: when a trading moment or a campaign opportunity came, the team couldn't react without a developer. The brief was blunt about what had to change: give the marketing team full control over content, products, and campaigns, without relying on anyone.

Almost every brand that comes to us has similar challenges. We solve it by building the theme as a system: a library of reusable sections and blocks, editable directly in Shopify's own editor. Each section balances ease of use with brand control. It's simple enough for anyone on the team to compose a campaign page or an entire new page from scratch, with the design language baked in so nothing drifts off-brand. Bold stays bold, no matter who's editing.

And the system reaches into the shop itself. Collection pages aren't locked to a rigid product grid: the team can weave editorial sections between the products, turning browsing into storytelling: heritage, craftsmanship, collectability, then back to the pieces. That's the storytelling platform the brief asked for, and the marketing team runs every part of it. Content and merchandising changes that used to sit in a developer queue are now a same-day job.

B2B on Shopify Plus: The Same Discipline, a Fraction of the Effort

When the wholesale channel came up, our approach was the same one that carried the rest of the build: take what Shopify Plus already ships. B2B is built into the platform: company accounts with multiple buyers and locations, per-location catalogs that each carry their own price list, quantity rules for order minimums and increments, and volume price breaks, all gated behind a dedicated B2B login. Because the storefront already followed Shopify's own standards and reused the same product data and templates as the D2C store, standing up wholesale, a channel that usually means a dedicated app or a separate build, was mostly configuration. Switching it on took days, not a project of its own.

The Migration: WooCommerce to Shopify Plus, Zero Downtime

On top of all that, there was still the migration. The store was rebuilt from the ground up from WooCommerce to Shopify Plus, and the brand's history moved with it: more than 120,000 orders, more than 80,000 customers, over 700 products, 100+ collections, 300+ blog posts, and gift cards. All of it moved without touching the live store, which kept trading throughout. We ran the migration in stages: the bulk first while the shop sold on, then, close to release, a final sweep that caught every last change, leaving no record behind. White glove meant exactly that: no editorial input needed from the brand at any point, and no downtime.

Results

We compared the first nine weeks after launch (11 May–14 July 2026) against the same period a year earlier (11 May–14 July 2025), which controls for seasonality. The deltas across that window:

Conversion and value per visitor

• Conversion rate: +86% desktop, +27% mobile
• Add-to-cart rate: +44%
• Checkout entry rate: +57%
• AOV: +4%

Performance (Core Web Vitals, strongest on PDP)

• Load time (LCP): −76% desktop, −62% mobile
• Interactivity (INP): −62% desktop, −66% mobile
• Visual stability (CLS): near-eliminated on desktop (0.38 to 0.01)
• Server response (TTFB): down 64-75% site-wide

Key Outcomes

• Native configurator, launched for the 10th anniversary: the brand's first build-your-own-necklace experience, fully native to Shopify, with a tailored editor and room to grow.
• Bold design on classic Shopify Liquid: a custom, brand-led storefront a non-technical team can run themselves.
• Zero-downtime migration: 120,000+ orders, 80,000+ customers and 700+ products moved from WooCommerce with the store trading throughout.
• B2B in days, not a project: wholesale switched on with Shopify Plus, reusing the same data and templates as the D2C store.

Summary

One decision shaped this project: stay as close to Shopify as possible. It's why the configurator runs on Metaobjects instead of an external app. It's why discounts and bundles just work, why the team edits the store in Shopify's own editor, and why B2B took days. Ten years in, Tilly Sveaas has a store that finally carries the brand's story, and a small team that runs all of it themselves.