Running St. John's E-Commerce, then fixing its Shopify theme

St. John is a luxury women's knitwear house: knit suits, jackets, dresses and evening wear, now designed by Humberto Leon. When it brought DYODE in, its E-Commerce department needed a leader while the company searched for a permanent one, and the team running promotions, email and site merchandising day to day needed a plan to work from.

Later the brand came back with a different problem. A previous agency had moved the store from Magento to Shopify, and the team was left with a theme it didn't fully understand and no access to the code repository. Pages were slow, every image had to be uploaded twice, and small changes like swapping the header logo meant editing theme code nobody in-house wanted to touch.

DYODE stepped in as St. John's interim Director of E-Commerce. We ran the department's daily meetings on promotions, email and demand against plan, and audited the business: marketing, operations, merchandising, logistics, customer service, technology and the team.

From that audit we set a roadmap and project plan, reviewed third-party contracts and renegotiated the Nosto and Listrak agreements, evaluated seven cross-border commerce options for international orders and recommended Global-e, which the team then moved forward with, and helped recruit an E-Commerce coordinator and source a permanent E-Commerce executive.

Before the development retainer started, we audited the theme's code and speed. The client's suspicions were right. The theme looped through the entire product catalog in the page head on every request, cart and 404 pages included. It downloaded both the mobile and desktop version of every image on every device, rendered the product page gallery twice, and loaded a 42 KB cookie-consent script ahead of everything else on the page.

The good news: none of it needed a rebuild. Each problem could be fixed in place, one ticket at a time, which is how St. John wanted to work.

Now we're St. John's Shopify development partner on a monthly retainer. We set up a development environment, then started on the audit list and the team's own requests: a site-wide font change the legal team needed, menu navigation updates, and a fix for a broken sold-out button on product pages.

Every ticket gets an estimate St. John approves before work starts, ships in two-week sprints, and passes developer, client and deployment QA. The speed fixes from the audit are in progress now.

During the interim engagement, St. John's E-Commerce department had a leader, a roadmap and a daily operating rhythm, and the search for its permanent executive was under way.

On the Shopify side, St. John learned its theme could be repaired rather than rebuilt, and it now has a development partner working through that list in the order the team sets, so theme changes no longer depend on in-house edits to code nobody knew.