Yaletown Business Improvement Association

YBIA had just completed a full rebrand with a comprehensive graphic standards guide, including the Spezia font family, an updated colour palette, photography direction, and layout principles. Bringing that brand to life on a website required more than dropping logos and colours into a theme. The site needed to feel like the rebrand, not just reference it.

We built a custom Shopify theme from the ground up against the new Yaletown Graphic Standards Guide v2.0. Typography, spacing, photography treatment, and layout principles were translated section by section so that every page reads as a continuation of the brand system rather than a website that happens to use the same colours.

YBIA’s digital presence is now a true extension of their refreshed identity, giving visitors a consistent experience from the brand campaigns they see in print and on social to the moment they land on the site.

YBIA runs a steady calendar of neighbourhood events, and visitors needed a frictionless way to save those events directly to their personal calendars. Off the shelf Shopify event apps were built for ticketing and RSVPs, came with recurring fees, and brought their own UI that would have conflicted with the new brand system.

We built the events system on Shopify blog posts with structured event data stored in Shopify metafields. On top of that, we built a custom Add to Calendar feature that generates an .ics file on click and supports Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, and Outlook, with the timezone correctly set to America/Vancouver so it stays accurate through daylight saving changes.

YBIA gets a clean, no cost event system that lives natively inside Shopify and matches the rest of the site, while visitors get a one click path from event listing to their personal calendar.

YBIA wanted upcoming events to be visible the moment a visitor lands on the homepage, but the team didn’t want to maintain a second list of events separate from the main events page.

We built a What’s Happening homepage section that pulls live from the same metafield powered events feed as the main events page. Events appear automatically in date order, and the section updates itself as events come and go.

The homepage stays current with zero manual upkeep, and YBIA’s content team only ever has to enter an event once.

YBIA maintains a commercial listings page that showcases available retail, office, and mixed use space across Yaletown. Manually maintaining listings was unsustainable, and the data lives with Spacelist, the commercial real estate platform that already powers the existing listings.

We embedded the Spacelist widget directly into the new commercial listings page, pre filtered to Yaletown geography. The page was designed to frame the widget with branded intro copy and surrounding chrome, while the widget itself stays auto updated from Spacelist’s live data.

YBIA never has to touch the listings again. Available spaces stay current automatically, and prospective tenants get the same filtering, map view, and listing detail experience they’d find on any major commercial real estate site.

Yaletown is hosting FIFA World Cup activations from June 11 to July 19, 2026, one of the neighbourhood’s biggest summer campaigns. YBIA needed a dedicated home on the site for the campaign that felt distinct from the standard event setup, more visual, and ready to scale as event details were added throughout the tournament.

We built a custom FIFA landing page as a top level item in the main navigation, with a layout designed specifically for the campaign rather than reusing the events template. The page features the campaign hero, full activation schedule, and supporting content tied to the tournament dates.

The FIFA campaign has its own purpose built home on the site rather than being shoehorned into the standard events flow, giving YBIA the visual impact the campaign deserves.