Hearth & Soul

Home, Heart, and Soul

Hearth & Soul approached us during a moment of expansion. With locations in Tallahassee, Austin, and St. Louis—and a growing reputation for blending curated retail with community and services—their digital presence was falling behind. Their old platform was slow, hard to navigate, and failed to support key offerings like gift registries and design consultations. With spring registry season approaching and increasing demand from non-local customers, the brand urgently needed a Shopify-powered rebuild that would reflect their in-store experience online.

Main Stack

Where Home Begins

Hearth & Soul is more than a retail boutique—it’s a curated lifestyle destination designed to feel like home. From apparel and home décor to kitchenware and one-on-one design consultations, the brand blends luxury goods with personal service and a warm, residential ambiance. Their business model is both DTC and experiential: blending ecommerce with in-store touchpoints like bridal registries and design services. What makes Hearth & Soul distinct is its emotional resonance—something the old website didn’t capture.

Building a Better Experience

The existing website no longer reflected the Hearth & Soul experience. Customers could browse products, but key offerings like gift registries and design consultations were disconnected from the shopping journey. Navigation was difficult, mobile performance lagged behind customer expectations, and the platform lacked the flexibility to support the brand’s continued growth.

1. Disconnected Customer Experience

   The website treated shopping, gift registries, and design consultations as separate experiences, making it difficult for customers to move naturally between the services that define the Hearth & Soul brand.

2. Mobile Shopping Friction

   With much of the site’s traffic coming from mobile devices, slow load times, inconsistent layouts, and difficult navigation created unnecessary friction throughout the shopping experience.

3. Challenging Product Discovery

   As the catalogue expanded, customers had a harder time finding products, exploring collections, and discovering complementary items, leading to a less intuitive browsing experience.
4. Limited Room to Grow
   
   The existing platform lacked the flexibility to support evolving content, seasonal campaigns, events, and new merchandising initiatives without ongoing development work.

Bringing the Experience Online

Gift Registry Integration

Challenge

Gift registries were an important part of the business, but the entire process happened in store. Customers had to rely on staff to create and manage registries, making it time consuming for everyone involved.

Solution

We integrated a Shopify compatible registry and customized the experience with dedicated registry product pages, shareable wish lists, and a workflow that made it easy for customers to create and manage their own registries online.

Benefit

Customers can build, update, and share their registry whenever it’s convenient, while staff spend less time managing the process behind the scenes.

Results

Gift registries are now part of the online shopping experience instead of being limited to the store. Customers have more flexibility when planning weddings, housewarmings, and other special occasions, while the team has a simpler process to support them.

Quick Shop Modal with Variant and Registry Support

Challenge

Browsing collections meant opening product pages over and over just to check colours, sizes, or add an item to a registry. It slowed down shopping and made it harder to explore multiple products, especially on mobile.

Solution

We built a custom Quick Shop modal that lets customers select variants, update quantities, add products to their cart, or save them to a registry without leaving the collection page. Everything they need is available in one place, keeping the shopping experience fast and uninterrupted.

Benefit

Customers can compare products, make selections, and continue browsing without constantly jumping between pages.

Results

The Quick Shop modal keeps customers engaged while they browse, making it easier to discover products, compare options, and add items to their cart or registry with fewer steps.

Mobile First UX and Performance

Challenge

The old site was slow, inconsistent, and difficult to use on mobile. Since most customers were shopping from their phones, everyday tasks like browsing products and selecting variants took more effort than they should.

Solution

We rebuilt the storefront on Shopify 2.0 with new templates, faster page loading, redesigned product pages, quick shop functionality, sticky navigation, and improved media handling to make the site feel faster and easier to use.

Benefit

Customers can get where they want to go with fewer clicks, spend less time waiting for pages to load, and shop comfortably on any device.

Results

The redesign removed many of the pain points that slowed customers down. The site feels quicker, product pages are easier to use, and shopping on a phone no longer feels like a compromise.

A Place to Gather

Every decision, from navigation to content to product discovery, was made with one goal in mind: recreating the warmth of the Hearth & Soul boutique online. The result is an experience that feels inviting, intuitive, and personal while giving the team a flexible platform to support continued growth.

What Changed

• Simplified navigation with curated collection pathways
• Faster mobile shopping experience
• Integrated registry and service experiences
• Flexible content management for marketing and events
• Modern Shopify architecture built to scale

Looking Ahead

Hearth & Soul now has a storefront that reflects the warmth, personality, and service customers experience in every location. With gift registries, design consultations, and a flexible Shopify Plus foundation, the team is well positioned to grow while continuing to deliver the thoughtful experience that defines the brand.