Rebuilt to be fast, accessible, and easy to run
The storefront did not match the product. We rebuilt GSI Outdoors' Shopify store on a modern, maintainable foundation without disrupting sales: faster pages, accessibility remediated to WCAG 2.2 AA, one consistent design system, and tools the team uses to merchandise and publish on its own.
- Performance
- 97*
- Accessibility
- 97*
- SEO
- 100
* Desktop Lighthouse scores.
View larger The challenge
GSI Outdoors makes camp cookware and outdoor kitchen gear for a loyal, detail-driven audience. The storefront did not match the product. The inherited Shopify theme was slow, visually dated, and inconsistent from page to page.
Routine merchandising also required developer time. Simple changes, a banner, a promotion, a shipping threshold, meant a ticket and a wait, which slowed the team down and made the site expensive to run.
Our mandate was to rebuild the storefront on a modern, maintainable foundation without disrupting sales: improve speed and accessibility, bring the design into one consistent system, and hand the team tools to merchandise and publish on their own.
Our approach
We rebuilt the store from the ground up and built the team a set of controls to run it.
Custom theme rebuild: We rebuilt the store on Shopify’s Dawn framework as a custom, component-based theme, with one typographic system (Inter and DM Mono) and reusable sections that keep every page consistent.
Accessibility remediation: We corrected color contrast, focus states, form labels, and heading structure across the theme to meet WCAG 2.2 AA, and published an accessibility statement.
Performance: We reduced page weight and cleaned up how the theme loads images and scripts to improve load times and Core Web Vitals.
Self-serve merchandising and content: We built sections the team controls without code, including a configurable announcement bar, promo and collection hero banners, and a free-shipping threshold that updates everywhere from one setting. We also built a Press and Media template that formats every press mention as a clean logo, blurb, and link, so new coverage posts itself correctly, and fixed predictive search to surface collections, pages, and suggested queries rather than products alone.
Compliance and ongoing optimization: We removed unsupported environmental claims across products, collections, and content to meet EU marketing rules, and supported competitive repricing across the catalog.
The results
The rebuild gave GSI a storefront that loads faster, meets accessibility standards, and the team can run on its own.
- Speed and search: Lighthouse scores of 97 for performance and 100 for SEO.
- Accessibility: Lighthouse accessibility score of 97, with the theme remediated to WCAG 2.2 AA and an accessibility statement published.
Beyond the numbers, merchandising that used to need a developer takes the team minutes, and the site stays consistent as they add products, campaigns, and press coverage.