Alinette Studio
A Romanian fashion brand, born from a family story. A Shopify store built entirely from scratch — a custom theme, a rethought catalog, and a private app that takes every order from invoice to shipping label.
The situation
ALINETTE — the name comes from Alina, the founder's mother — came with one firm requirement: the imagery before anything else. A landing page full of photography and video, no dead space, navigation stripped to the essentials, with references like Jacquemus and Faithfull the Brand. No App Store theme was quiet enough for this brief, and everything else — catalog architecture, operations, performance — was left to us.
What we built
We built the theme from scratch on Shopify Skeleton — no frameworks, no third-party apps in the storefront, zero external scripts. The identity was pulled straight from the logo, with self-hosted, subset typography. The catalog was rethought: each color of a collection is its own product, with its own gallery, story, and URL, and the relationships between pieces live in metafields — “Complete the set” always suggests the exact match, in the same color. On top of that, a refined experience: a global cart drawer, real lightbox zoom, prefetch-on-intent that makes navigation feel instant, and notify-me on sold-out sizes. The invisible part is a private Shopify app — a Cloudflare Worker with React admin extensions — that turns each order page into a command center: SmartBill invoicing in one click, GLS shipping labels with correctly calculated cash-on-delivery, postal-code validation, and auto-reconciliation of COD orders on delivery. And performance was treated as a design principle, not a final optimization — aggressively compressed media, inline critical CSS, subset fonts, and a single JS bundle.