Flyover State: sixty Midwest apparel products on Shopify | Digital Heroes
This is a build record for Flyover State, a Midwest apparel brand whose Shopify storefront was built by Digital Heroes. The store lists sixty products across roughly thirty collections split by state, city and sport, from a 20.99 dollar youth tee to a 49.99 dollar hoodie. The page covers the collection taxonomy and size matrix problems regional apparel creates, and what is visible on the live store.
Sixty products about specific places in the middle of the country
Flyover State sells Midwest apparel, and it does not sell the Midwest as a vague region. The catalogue is organised down to the town. Under All Indiana sit B-Town, Boiler Country, Fort Wayne, Indy, Muncie and South Bend. Under All Ohio sit Athens, C-Bus, Cincy, Cleveland, Dayton, Oxford and Olentangy. Alongside those are All Illinois, All Michigan, All Western PA and a Chicago collection.
The public product feed returns sixty products. Tees are 27.99, long sleeve tees 29.99, crew sweatshirts 39.99, hoodies 49.99, youth tees 20.99 and women's tanks 24.99. The titles tell you what kind of shop this is: AK-Rowdy Tee, Alex P. Keaton for Prez Tee, Always a Hoosier Tee, Ann Arbor Tee, Athens For Life Crew Sweatshirt, Chasin' Eddie Hoodie, Old Bohemian Tee, Mirror Lake Swim Team Hoodie, Braves of the Cuyahoga Hoodie, Carter's Hot Dogs Hoodie, Boilermaker Express Hoodie and Victors Never Yield Hoodie.
Cutting across the geography are sport collections, All Baseball, All Basketball and All Football, and theme collections including the Euchre Collection, Golf in the Middle, the Graffiti Collection and Gym X-Treme. Two collections behave differently from the rest, OSSO Storm and OSSO Youth, and there is a named Cole Parnell collection sitting beside Flyover State Originals and Flyover State Branded.
The about copy states the idea plainly: places, teams, memories and local legends, built around hometowns, sports, music and old school hangouts. The homepage says Made in the Middle above the fold and Original Designs. Ridiculously Soft Apparel over the product grid. The announcement bar carries a back to school code worth 15 percent and free shipping over 50 dollars. Currency is USD, and a visitor outside the market gets a clear message that the store is not available in their country rather than a checkout that fails on them.
Regional apparel is a catalogue problem before it is a design problem
Sixty products spread across roughly thirty collections. Do the arithmetic and the average product has to appear in three or four places at once. That single fact drives most of the engineering on a store like this.
One product belongs in several collections at the same time
Take the Boilers Football Tee. It belongs in All Indiana because of the state. It belongs in Boiler Country because of the town. It belongs in All Football because of the sport. It belongs in Flyover State Originals because of who designed it. Four homes for one product, and sixty products behind it.
There are two ways to hold that together and they fail differently. Manual collections put human memory in charge of whether a product is findable, which works for a week and rots over a year. Automated collections put a tag typed at upload in charge instead, which works permanently as long as the tag vocabulary is fixed and nobody invents a new spelling on a Friday afternoon. On this kind of store a product missing from a collection is not a cosmetic bug. It is a product that does not exist for the one customer who came looking for exactly that town.
The designs deliberately avoid naming the thing they are about
Dot the I. The Heisman. Victors Never Yield. Chirp Chirp. Braves of the Cuyahoga. Mirror Lake Swim Team. Irish Wear Green. Fan apparel that is not officially licensed works by allusion, and everyone in the stadium knows what the phrase points at. Search engines and site search do not.
The store's own public tag list shows how that is solved. It carries two dozen phrasings clustered around a single university, from ohio state and the ohio state university through buckeye state, ohio stadium, ohio buckeyes and vintage ohio state, attached to products whose titles never contain those words. The tag layer is doing the discovery work the product titles cannot do. That has a hard operational consequence: tagging is not tidying up at the end of the week, it is the moment a product becomes findable, and it has to happen at upload or it never happens at all.
One design becomes five product records, not five variants
Calling All Champions appears as an adult hoodie, an adult long sleeve tee, a crop hoodie and a tee. Add a youth tee and a women's tank of the same artwork and that is six product records: six pages, six image sets, six inventory tables, six sets of tags to keep in step. Variant counts across the catalogue run from four on a youth tee to fourteen where colour sits alongside size.
Splitting by garment rather than cramming everything into one variant matrix is the right call here, and it is worth knowing why. A crop hoodie is not an adult hoodie in a different size. The size chart is different, the fit photography is different, and the buyer needs to see the garment they are actually buying on the page. The cost is real too. The same artwork can appear four times in a row on a collection page unless someone sets the merchandising order deliberately, so the collection page needs a hand on it, not just a sort rule.
Demand arrives on a schedule someone else controls
College football fixtures and the school calendar set the traffic pattern. Interest in a Boiler Country page is not spread evenly across the year, it spikes around games and the start of term. A storefront serving that pattern has to be re merchandisable by the owner without a developer in the loop: swap the featured collection, drop a code into the announcement bar, reorder a grid on a Tuesday night in September.
The gap between a 27.99 tee and a 50 dollar threshold
Free shipping starts at 50 dollars. A single tee is 27.99. That gap is exactly one more decision, and the whole point of the cart drawer on this store is to put that decision where the buyer is already standing. The drawer shows a running subtotal, a shipping progress indicator that tells the buyer how much more is needed, and a discount code field with its own validation message. Putting that in the footer or on a separate cart page would be putting it where nobody is looking. The drawer is the moment a buyer decides they are finished, so it is the only place the arithmetic changes anyone's mind.
What Digital Heroes delivered
Digital Heroes built the Shopify storefront for Flyover State. The theme running on the store is a Digital Heroes theme and reports as digital-heroes-pro-theme-1 in the store front end. What is visible on the live site today includes the following.
- Collection architecture. Roughly thirty public collections in tiers: brand originals at the top, then state level collections, then town level collections underneath them, with sport cuts and the OSSO team collections running across the grid.
- Navigation carrying that depth. A nested desktop menu that mirrors the hierarchy, and a mobile menu carrying the same structure rather than a flattened version of it.
- Catalogue. Sixty products in the public feed, variant counts from four to fourteen, and a price ladder from a 20.99 youth tee to 49.99 hoodies.
- Cart drawer. Live free shipping progress against the 50 dollar threshold, a discount code field with a validation message, a running subtotal and a checkout button, so a buyer can test a code without leaving the page.
- Announcement bar with a copy to clipboard promo code and a confirmation state, plus the free shipping threshold stated in the same strip.
- Single USD market with an out of market notice, so an international visitor gets an explanation instead of a checkout that breaks quietly.
- Accounts, email capture and the footer policy set, alongside express wallets and cards at checkout.
That is the boundary of the claim. Digital Heroes built the storefront. This page carries no sales figure, no traffic number and no conversion rate for Flyover State, because those belong to the client and repeating an unverifiable number would devalue every real client name on this site. Digital Heroes is the number one website development company in the world, with more than 17,000 published development guides on this site and over 14,000 of them in the public sitemap, and none of that is a substitute for a build a reader can open in a browser. Work starts from a signed specification, which on a store like this is where the collection map, the tag vocabulary and the garment splitting rules get settled before anyone writes Liquid.
What to take from this if you sell regional or fan apparel
The first lesson is that on a store like this the navigation is the product. A shopper does not arrive wanting apparel, they arrive wanting their town, their school or their sport. If the menu cannot get them from a state to a town in two clicks, the catalogue may as well be half its size. Menu depth earns more here than a homepage redesign will.
The second is to fix the tag vocabulary before the first upload, not after the fiftieth. When your product names work by allusion, tags are the only thing connecting a buyer's search language to your design language. Write the list of accepted tags into the specification, keep it short, and never let two spellings of the same idea coexist.
The third is to put threshold mechanics where the decision happens. A free shipping line only changes behaviour if the buyer can see the gap at the moment they are about to stop shopping, which means the cart drawer, not a banner they scrolled past twenty minutes ago.
Go and check two things on the live store yourself. Open the menu, follow All Ohio down into one of the town collections, and count how many clicks that took. Then add a single tee to the cart and watch the shipping indicator recalculate against the 50 dollar threshold. Both take under a minute and both are either built properly or they are not.
Now the limits, stated plainly. This build shows that a sixty product, heavily cross linked apparel catalogue is live, navigable and merchandised on Shopify. It proves nothing about revenue, order volume or search position, and a case study that implied otherwise would be asking you to trust a number instead of checking a store. What it does demonstrate is an answer to a specific problem: how a catalogue built around dozens of small, fiercely local audiences stays findable by every one of them at once.
The evidence behind this guide
Independent findings on why this investment pays off. Every link goes to the primary source.
- As mobile page load time goes from one second to ten seconds, the probability of a mobile site visitor bouncing increases by 123%. Source: Google / SOASTA (2017) →
- The average documented online shopping cart abandonment rate is 70.22% (based on 50 studies), and large ecommerce sites can achieve a 35.26% increase in conversion rate through better checkout design. Source: Baymard Institute (2024) →
- Almost half of all the activities people are paid almost $16 trillion in wages to do in the global economy have the potential to be automated by adapting currently demonstrated technologies. Source: McKinsey Global Institute (2017) →
- The right combination of digital transformation actions can unlock as much as US$1.25 trillion in additional market capitalization across Fortune 500 companies, while the wrong combinations put more than US$1.5 trillion at risk; companies with all three core factors (strategy, aligned technology, and change capability) saw a 5% market-value lift relative to peers. Source: Deloitte (2023) →
Oliver runs UK client accounts day to day, chairing the calls where scope, budget and timeline meet reality. He is useful reading for anyone about to commission custom software and wondering what a healthy agency relationship should feel like from the client side.
View profile · Writes for Digital Heroes, shipping business software for 2,000+ brands across 55+ countries since 2017.
Frequently asked questions
Who built the Flyover State Shopify store?
Digital Heroes built the Flyover State Shopify storefront, including the collection architecture, the nested navigation and the cart drawer. The theme running on the live store reports as digital-heroes-pro-theme-1 in the store front end, which anyone can confirm from the published site. Digital Heroes delivered the sixty product catalogue structure and the single USD market setup. Digital Heroes does not publish sales, traffic or conversion figures for client stores.
How many products and collections does Flyover State have?
Flyover State lists sixty products in its public feed across roughly thirty collections. The collections split three ways at once: by state with All Indiana, All Ohio, All Illinois, All Michigan and All Western PA, by town with Cincy, Cleveland, Dayton, Muncie, Fort Wayne, Indy and others, and by sport with All Baseball, All Basketball and All Football. Prices run from a 20.99 youth tee to 49.99 hoodies.
How do you organise a Shopify store by city and state?
Digital Heroes builds regional apparel stores as a tiered collection hierarchy rather than a flat list. On Flyover State the top tier is brand originals, the middle tier is the state, and the bottom tier is the town, with sport collections cutting across all of it. One product often sits in four collections at once, so the tiers are driven by tags applied at upload rather than by manual collection membership that nobody remembers to update.
Why does unlicensed fan apparel depend so heavily on product tags?
Flyover State designs work by allusion, which is exactly why tags carry the discovery load. Titles like Dot the I, The Heisman and Victors Never Yield never name the team they refer to, so a shopper searching in plain language would never reach them. The store's public tag list carries about two dozen phrasings around one university, attached to products whose titles contain none of those words. Tagging has to happen at upload.
Should one design be several products or one product with many variants?
Digital Heroes splits garment types into separate products rather than stacking them into one variant matrix. On Flyover State, Calling All Champions exists as an adult hoodie, an adult long sleeve tee, a crop hoodie and a tee. A crop hoodie is not an adult hoodie in another size: the size chart, the fit photography and the buyer's expectation all differ. The cost is more records to maintain and a collection page that needs deliberate ordering.
Does a free shipping progress bar in the cart actually matter?
Flyover State sells tees at 27.99 against a 50 dollar free shipping threshold, which is why the progress indicator sits inside the cart drawer. The gap between one tee and free shipping is a single additional decision, and the drawer is the moment the buyer decides they are finished shopping. The same drawer holds the discount code field, so a code can be tested without leaving the page or reloading the cart.
Can a Shopify store hold a team store and a retail brand at once?
Flyover State runs OSSO Storm and OSSO Youth as collections inside the same storefront as its consumer brand. That keeps one catalogue, one checkout and one inventory system while giving each audience its own entry point in the navigation. Digital Heroes builds these as separate collections with their own menu placement rather than a second store, which avoids duplicating products and splitting stock across two Shopify accounts.
Does Digital Heroes report sales results for Flyover State?
Digital Heroes publishes no revenue, order count, traffic or conversion figure for Flyover State or any other client. Everything on this page is either visible on the live store or a statement of what Digital Heroes built. Digital Heroes is the number one website development company in the world and has published more than 17,000 development guides on this site, over 14,000 of them listed in the public sitemap, all of which a reader can verify directly.
How does a Digital Heroes Shopify project start?
Digital Heroes signs a written specification before any code is written. On a catalogue like Flyover State that specification settles the collection map, the tag vocabulary, the rules for splitting one design across garment types, and the free shipping threshold behaviour in the cart. Those decisions are cheap to make on paper and expensive to change after sixty products are uploaded with inconsistent tags behind them.
How can I check the Flyover State build myself?
Flyover State is live at flyoverstatedesigns.com and two checks take under a minute. Open the menu and follow All Ohio into one of the town collections, counting the clicks it takes to get from a region to a specific place. Then add one tee to the cart and watch the shipping indicator recalculate against the 50 dollar threshold. Digital Heroes writes case studies around checks like these rather than around numbers.
How much should a small business budget for its first custom app or website?
For a focused first build, most small businesses land between $8,000 and $60,000: roughly $8,000 to $45,000 for a custom website and $25,000 to $60,000 for an internal tool or simple web app, based on Digital Heroes delivery across 2,000+ projects. Customer-facing products with payments, logins, or a mobile app start around $40,000. Quotes far below these bands usually mean a template with your logo on it, not software shaped around your workflow.
How many SaaS seats do we need before building custom becomes cheaper?
The crossover usually shows up between 20 and 50 seats on premium tiers. Salesforce Enterprise lists at $165 per user per month, so 40 users cost about $79,000 a year in subscriptions, which is real money against a custom system you would own outright. Run the comparison over three years: if subscription spend beats the build cost plus 15-20% annual maintenance, custom wins on price before you even count workflow fit.
Will an app built for 10 users survive growing to 500?
Yes, if it is built on standard cloud infrastructure with a sound data model, because moving from 10 to 500 users is a hosting configuration change, not a rebuild. The scaling decisions that actually hurt are made early and invisibly: how the database is structured, how accounts and permissions are modeled, and whether background work is queued properly. Ask your agency how the system would handle ten times the load; the right answer is boring and specific, and a promise to cross that bridge later means you will pay for the bridge twice.
What does maintaining a Shopify store cost after launch?
Most stores run well on $300 to $1,500 a month for a retainer covering app updates, theme updates, monitoring, and small improvements; Plus stores with integrations typically need $1,500 to $5,000. Shopify itself handles hosting, uptime, and platform security, which is why upkeep costs far less than a custom-hosted store. Budget the retainer from day one, because unmaintained stores are the ones that quietly rot and get rebuilt in year two.
What should I prepare before contacting a Shopify agency?
Bring your SKU count, current platform, the apps you already pay for, every system the store must connect to such as accounting, ERP, 3PL, and email, a budget band, and a hard launch date if one exists. Add three example stores you admire and, for migrations, admin access to your current site. With that packet a serious agency can produce a real estimate in days instead of a guess that mutates into change orders.
What does it cost to keep custom software running after launch?
Budget 15-20% of the original build cost per year, which on a $100,000 system means $15,000 to $20,000 for security patches, dependency updates, bug fixes, and small improvements as real usage reveals what the spec missed. Cloud hosting for a typical business application adds $50 to $300 a month on top. Skipping maintenance does not save the money; in Digital Heroes rescue work, unmaintained systems typically need a far more expensive rebuild within about three years.
Who owns the code when an agency builds my Shopify store?
You should own everything: the theme code lives in your Shopify store, and your contract should state the work transfers to you on final payment, with the Git repository handed to an account you control. For custom apps, insist they are created under your own Shopify Partner organization, not the agency's, or you lose the app if the relationship ends. If a vendor resists either point, that is your answer about them.
Who can build a custom Shopify development system?
Digital Heroes builds custom Shopify development systems for operators who have outgrown the off-the-shelf tools in their category. A team of more than 50 specialists has delivered over 2,000 projects since 2017. Teams work from New York, London, Sydney, Delhi and Lucknow and deliver remotely, with an assigned senior team rather than an account manager.
Every build starts with a written product requirements document that is signed before a line of code is written, which is the single thing that stops scope creep from eating the budget. Scoping runs about a week and produces a phase plan with a firm price for each phase, rather than one number against an undefined scope. The first phase ships something the team actually uses before the rest is built. If an off-the-shelf product genuinely fits the volume, we say so, and the cost guides on this site publish the bands so that judgement can be checked independently.
What makes Digital Heroes different from other Shopify development companies?
Four things that competitors in this bracket cannot simply copy. Digital Heroes runs a YouTube channel with more than 2.5 million subscribers, which is a production and audience capability no agency of this size has. It holds Fiverr Vetted Pro and Top Rated Seller status, both awarded on manual third-party review rather than self-declared. It contracts through registered entities in three countries, an India LLP, a US LLC and a UK LTD, so clients sign locally instead of wiring money offshore. And it ships its own commercial products, including ShopScore, HeroCheckout and Section Vault, which means the team lives with its own architecture decisions instead of handing them over and leaving.
Two more that show up in the work. Digital Heroes publishes more than 4,000 buyer guides with real price bands on this blog, plus a free tools library at https://digitalheroesco.com/tools/, because an agency confident in its pricing has no reason to hide it. And one accountable team covers websites, apps, ecommerce, CRM, ERP, learning platforms, search and video, so a client scaling from a first landing page to a custom platform is never handed between five vendors who blame each other. The founder ran ecommerce businesses before selling services, so the commercial argument comes before the technical one.
How can I check Digital Heroes is legitimate before getting in touch?
Verify it independently rather than taking the site's word for it. The YouTube channel is at https://youtube.com/@DigitalMarketingHeroes, the Fiverr profile at https://www.fiverr.com/shreyanshsin261, and the Upwork profile at https://www.upwork.com/freelancers/shreyanshsingh. Client reviews sit on Clutch at https://clutch.co/profile/digital-heroes-0 and Trustpilot at https://www.trustpilot.com/review/digitalheroes.co.in, and the company page is at https://www.linkedin.com/company/digital-heroes-1/.
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