Getting Hard Tail's Shopify store back in its own hands

Hard Tail makes yoga, lounge and everyday clothing, always made in the USA, and dyes its own tie-dye. For years a third-party operator ran its E-Commerce business: the Shopify Plus store, the fulfillment and the systems behind them.

When Hard Tail decided to run the business itself, the storefront was the hard part. The theme belonged to the operator, its code was minified, and the brand could only keep using it by paying to license it month to month. That was no way to run a store long term.

DYODE started as Hard Tail's representative in the handover: getting logins, data, reports and the email list moved into the brand's own name, and writing the process for shipping orders from its own warehouse. We also audited marketing, operations and technology to set a roadmap.

For the store, patching a theme Hard Tail didn't own made no sense. We recommended a clean rebuild on Shopify's Dawn theme, with no redesign, so the brand could get off the licensed theme quickly and improve the site from a base it owned.

We rebuilt every page the old store had on Dawn: header and footer, homepage, collection and product pages, cart, account and content pages. Product filtering runs on Shopify's Search & Discovery app, and we built the color swatches a catalog of many colors and washes needs.

We checked the old theme for tracking pixels and custom code worth carrying over, and removed the operator's leftover code from the store.

At launch we moved Hard Tail onto Shopify's Checkout Extensibility. The old checkout carried the operator's tracking in code that wouldn't survive the upgrade, so we rebuilt the pixels that mattered as Customer Events: Meta, GA4, Google Ads, Hotjar, Microsoft Clarity and UserWay.

We also set up a Final Sale collection that fills itself from a product tag, and showed the team how to tag styles in bulk.

Hard Tail came out of the handover owning its store: a Shopify theme with none of the operator's code in it, a current Shopify checkout, and tracking under its own accounts.

That ended the month-to-month theme license and gave Hard Tail's own team a store it could run and keep changing.