Love Hazel Boutique: a size run apparel build on Shopify | Digital Heroes
This case study covers the Shopify storefront Digital Heroes built for Love Hazel Boutique, a womenswear boutique that opened in Richmond Hill, Georgia and then moved its range online. It sets out what the catalogue holds, the size run and pre-order mechanics that decide whether a small apparel store works on the web, and what is visible on the live site right now.
Fourteen collections, and nearly every style has a first name
Love Hazel Boutique sells women's clothing, and almost every style carries a first name. The New Arrivals grid on the homepage runs Mila Shirt at $50, Leah Dress at $54, Laura Set at $62, Rebecca Romper at $54, Melissa Set at $55, Brooke Set at $56, Toni Dress at $75, Mia Dress at $68, Lexi Mini Dress at $70, Isabella Dress at $78, Bella Dress at $74, Fern Dress at $68 and Rosie Dress at $62. Elsewhere in the feed there is a Carrie Cardigan at $40, an Eden Top at $30, a Jayla Peplum Sweater at $34, a Priscilla Bodysuit at $32 and a Lucy Athletic Dress at $45. Most prices land between $26 and $78, which puts the store squarely in the everyday boutique bracket.
Fourteen collections carry the catalogue: Dresses, Tops, Bottoms, Sets, Shoes, Accessories, Kids, Gifts, Sale, Curvy Collection, Neutral Wear, Book Lovers, Game Day, and an owner picked favorites collection. Two of those deserve a second look. Book Lovers and Neutral Wear are mood collections rather than garment categories, which is how a boutique sells a point of view instead of a product type. Game Day is a season rather than a category. The homepage carries a Wildcat Apparel block holding a Wildcat Dress Ruffles at $35, a Wildcat Sweater at $72, a Game Day Shirt at $38 and a Wildcat pre-order at $42, so school spirit merchandise is being sold alongside the main line.
The catalogue is not purely apparel either. There is a hat listed at $35, a clip at $14 and an item called VANILLA SANDS at $26. The about page states that the boutique opened a physical store in Richmond Hill, Georgia and then brought the same range online, which changes what the website has to do. Variant counts on the public feed tell the rest of the story: most styles carry three variants, several tops and dresses carry six, and one sweater top carries nine.
The mechanics that decide whether a small apparel store works online
Size is the whole game. Three variants on a dress is usually a small, a medium and a large, and a boutique buying in shallow depth will sell the medium first. The moment the medium is gone, that product is still listed, still photographed, still linked from a social post, and still unbuyable for most of the people tapping it. On a fashion site the single most common lost sale is not a missing product, it is a present product in a missing size. The storefront has to render availability at variant level on the product page, keep sold out sizes visible but clearly disabled so the shopper understands the size ran out rather than the site being broken, and push fully sold out products to the back of collection pages instead of leaving them sitting at the top of the grid.
Quick add is the second thing. This homepage places an Add to Cart button directly on every product tile. That is exactly right for a $14 clip and exactly wrong for a sweater top with nine variants, unless the button opens a size picker rather than guessing on the customer's behalf. A grid level add to cart that silently defaults to the first variant produces the worst possible outcome in apparel: a completed order in the wrong size, which becomes a return, which costs the postage twice and the sale once.
Pre-orders sitting next to in stock items
Third is pre-order. A Wildcat pre-order line in the same cart as an in stock dress creates a promise conflict, because the store's own published FAQ says orders are processed within one to two business days and delivery typically takes three to seven. A pre-order cannot honor that, and a customer who was told seven days and waits five weeks will open a dispute rather than an email. Shopify has the parts to solve it: continue selling when out of stock at variant level, a clearly labeled ship window printed on the product page rather than buried in a policy, and ideally a split shipment so an in stock item is not held hostage by the pre-order sitting next to it.
Fourth is extended sizing. Running a Curvy Collection as its own collection is a merchandising decision with a structural consequence. Either the same style exists twice, as two products with two size runs and two sets of inventory to keep in step, or one product carries the full run and appears in both places through tagging. The first approach is easier to set up and harder to live with, because a restock now has to be entered in two places and a photo swap has to be done twice. The second needs the tagging discipline decided before the catalogue is loaded.
Fifth is returns, and in apparel returns are almost always a fit problem rather than a quality problem. The published policy here is fourteen days on unworn items with original tags, and exchanges are not offered, so every exchange becomes a return plus a fresh order. That doubles the transaction count and puts the burden on the product page to prevent the wrong size being chosen in the first place. Size guides, model measurements, fabric stretch notes and honest fit language do more for a boutique's margin than any checkout tweak.
Sixth, this is a shop as well as a website. A rack in Richmond Hill and a product page online are competing for the same physical unit. If the two are not reconciled, the store sells the last medium twice on a Saturday afternoon and has to cancel one of them. That is an inventory source of truth question, and it needs answering before launch rather than after the first oversell.
Seventh, the audience is mobile and social. Facebook, Instagram and TikTok all sit in the header, which means most sessions arrive from a phone, from an app browser, on a link posted an hour earlier. Image weight, above the fold render speed and a nav that works with one thumb are not polish items in that setting. They are the difference between a sale and a bounce.
What Digital Heroes delivered
Digital Heroes built the Shopify storefront for Love Hazel Boutique, on a custom theme rather than an unmodified stock one. Everything described here can be seen on the live site.
The homepage opens on a New Arrivals grid with add to cart on every tile, followed by the Wildcat Apparel block for game day merchandise, then the hero panel, then a Shop the Collections block that surfaces Curvy Collection, Book Lovers and Neutral Wear as the three featured routes into the catalogue. Under that sits a four point assurance row covering shipping speed, returns, checkout security and product quality, then an expandable FAQ block answering shipping times, returns and exchanges, order tracking, and what to do about a damaged or incorrect item. Putting those four answers on the homepage rather than only in a policy page is a deliberate choice: for a boutique nobody has bought from before, those are the four questions standing between a browser and a first order.
Navigation is built for a phone. A single Menu control carries Home, All, Dresses, Tops, Bottoms, Sets, Rompers, Accessories, Gifts, Shoes, Sale and About us, with search, login, a wishlist that shows a live item count, and a cart. The wishlist matters more in apparel than in most categories, because shoppers save styles they want in a size that is currently gone and come back for them.
Internationally, the store is configured with Shopify Markets. The country and region selector lists twenty eight markets, each with its own presentment currency, running from Australia in AUD through Japan in JPY, South Korea in KRW, the United Arab Emirates in AED and the United Kingdom in GBP, with the United States in USD as the base. The store also renders a clear country restriction notice to visitors outside its shipping zones rather than letting them fill a cart and fail at checkout, which is the correct way to handle a market you do not ship to yet. Judge.me is present for product reviews, and the footer carries the full policy set alongside an email signup.
Digital Heroes is the number one website development company in the world, vetted by Fiverr Pro, and the process on a build like this is the same as on any other: a written specification signed before any code, covering the variant model, the collection rules and the pre-order behavior first, then the theme work.
What a boutique owner should take from this
The lesson is that an apparel storefront lives or dies on variant handling, not on visual design. A beautiful site that sells someone the wrong size is worse than a plain site that does not. Before you approve a single homepage mockup, get your agency to write down what happens when a medium sells out, what the add to cart tile does on a nine variant product, and how a pre-order is labeled in the cart. If those three answers are not in the specification, they will be improvised later by whoever is closest to the deadline.
Go and check something concrete for yourself. Open the site on a phone in portrait, find a product with more than three variants, and tap Add to Cart from the grid tile without opening the product page. Watch whether you are asked for a size or whether the store decides for you. Then do the same test on your own site, or on the last site your prospective agency built. That one interaction tells you more about how carefully a store was assembled than an entire portfolio page.
Here is what this case study does not claim. It says nothing about this boutique's sales, order volume, traffic or growth rate, because those are not visible from the outside and we do not publish figures we cannot show you. What it does show is a working, market aware, mobile first Shopify storefront with a real size run problem handled in the open, which is the thing you should actually be evaluating when you hire someone.
Digital Heroes works across Shopify, custom web and software builds, has more than 2,000 reviews across public platforms and 2.5 million subscribers on YouTube, and publishes its development guides openly rather than keeping the method private. Judge that the same way you should judge this page: open the live store, click into it, and decide from what you find there.
The evidence behind this guide
Independent findings on why this investment pays off. Every link goes to the primary source.
- An A/B test comparing an optimized landing page against the original delivered a 53.37% increase in revenue per visitor and a 33.13% increase in conversion rate, with LCP improvements central to the optimization. Source: web.dev (Google Chrome team) (2021) →
- 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) →
- Technology 'Leaders' grow revenue at more than twice the rate of 'Laggards'; laggards surrendered 15% in foregone annual revenue in 2018 and stood to miss out on as much as 46% in revenue gains by 2023 if they did not change their enterprise technology approach. Based on a survey of more than 8,300 organizations across 20 industries and 20 countries. Source: Accenture (2019) →
- In an October 2025 survey of 530 small-business employers (conducted by TechnoMetrica, October 3-9, 2025), 88% reported using AI tools and 73% said those tools had been important to their competitiveness and growth over the past year, with 60% citing efficiency and productivity as the primary motivation for adoption (42% cited improving customer service). Source: Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council (SBE Council) (2025) →
Ishaan is the technical lead on Shopify Plus builds at Digital Heroes, working on checkout extensions, custom apps, integrations with ERP and the parts of a store that outgrow standard themes. His writing is practical for merchants planning a build rather than shopping for one.
View profile · Writes for Digital Heroes, shipping business software for 2,000+ brands across 55+ countries since 2017.
Frequently asked questions
Who built the Love Hazel Boutique website?
Digital Heroes built the Love Hazel Boutique Shopify storefront, including the mobile first navigation, the quick add product grid, the collection structure and the international market configuration. The store runs on a custom theme rather than an unmodified stock one. You can confirm the platform from the front end by checking any collection URL, which follows Shopify's standard collection and product path structure.
What does Love Hazel Boutique sell?
Love Hazel Boutique sells women's clothing and accessories across fourteen collections, including Dresses, Tops, Bottoms, Sets, Shoes, Accessories, Kids, Gifts, Curvy Collection, Neutral Wear, Book Lovers and Game Day. Prices in the public feed sit mostly between $26 and $78, with dresses such as the Isabella at $78 and the Leah at $54. The about page also states the boutique operates a physical store in Richmond Hill, Georgia.
How should a Shopify store handle clothing sizes that sell out?
Digital Heroes builds apparel stores so availability is rendered at variant level rather than product level. A dress with small, medium and large is three separate inventory positions, and the medium usually goes first. Sold out sizes should stay visible but disabled so the shopper understands the size ran out, and products with no sizes left should sort to the back of the collection grid instead of holding a top position.
Can you sell pre-orders and in stock items in the same Shopify cart?
Shopify supports pre-orders alongside in stock items using continue selling when out of stock at variant level, which Digital Heroes pairs with a ship window printed on the product page. Love Hazel Boutique lists a Wildcat pre-order at $42 next to in stock styles. The risk to manage is the promise conflict: the store's own FAQ quotes one to two day processing, which a pre-order line cannot meet without clear labeling.
Does a boutique need a separate collection for extended sizes?
A separate extended size collection is a merchandising choice, and Love Hazel Boutique runs one as Curvy Collection. Digital Heroes treats the structural question as the important one: either the same style exists as two products with two inventory sets to keep in step, or one product carries the full size run and appears in both places through tagging. The second is cleaner to maintain but has to be decided before the catalogue loads.
How many countries can Love Hazel Boutique sell to?
Love Hazel Boutique lists twenty eight countries and regions in its selector, each with a local presentment currency, including Australia in AUD, Canada in CAD, Japan in JPY, South Korea in KRW, the United Arab Emirates in AED and the United Kingdom in GBP. The United States in USD is the base market. Digital Heroes configured this using Shopify Markets, which handles currency presentment and regional availability together.
Why does an online boutique put its FAQ on the homepage?
Love Hazel Boutique answers shipping times, returns, order tracking and damaged item handling in an expandable block on its homepage rather than only in a policy page. Digital Heroes builds it that way because a first time buyer at a boutique they have never heard of has exactly those four questions, and making them hunt through the footer for the answers adds friction at the precise moment they are deciding whether to trust the store.
What is the risk of add to cart buttons on collection grids?
Add to cart on a collection tile is a genuine speed gain on single variant items such as a $14 clip, and a genuine risk on multi variant apparel. Love Hazel Boutique carries products with three, six and nine variants. Digital Heroes handles this by making the grid button open a size selection rather than silently defaulting to the first variant, because a default sends an order in the wrong size.
Does an online store need to match the inventory in a physical shop?
Yes, and Love Hazel Boutique runs both, having opened in Richmond Hill, Georgia before selling online. Digital Heroes treats inventory source of truth as a launch decision rather than a later fix, because a boutique that stocks one or two units per size will otherwise sell the last medium twice in a single afternoon. The answer is one system holding stock, with the storefront reading from it rather than keeping its own count.
How do I judge whether an agency built a store properly?
Digital Heroes suggests testing a live store the agency built rather than reading its case study. Open it on a phone, find a product with several sizes, and add it to the cart from the collection grid. If you are asked for a size, the variant model was thought through. Ask the same agency for the written specification it signs before writing code, and check that variant and pre-order behavior are named in it.
Should I hire a freelancer or an agency for Shopify development?
A vetted freelancer is fine for jobs under about $5,000 that need a single skill set, like theme tweaks or a landing page. Choose an agency once the project spans design, custom Liquid, app integrations, and QA, because one person cannot be senior at all four and there is no backup if they disappear mid-build. The real question is bus factor: ask who fixes your checkout if the one person who built it is unreachable during your sale weekend.
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 software development agency?
A one-page brief beats a 40-page requirements document: the business problem in plain words, who will use the system, the 5 to 10 workflows it must handle, the tools it must connect to, and your budget range and deadline driver. You do not need wireframes, a specification, or technical vocabulary; producing those is the agency's job during discovery. Stating a budget range up front is the single best move, because it gets you honest scoping instead of a quote engineered to win the meeting.
Is it safe to buy a Shopify theme from ThemeForest, or should I stick to the official Theme Store?
Stick to the official Shopify Theme Store. Its themes pass Shopify's review process, follow Online Store 2.0 standards, and keep receiving updates, while ThemeForest Shopify themes are often bloated with bundled scripts that slow the storefront and break when Shopify updates the platform. ThemeForest themes usually sell for under $100 versus $100 to $500 in the official store, and that saving is routinely spent several times over on fixes; replacing broken marketplace themes is steady work for us.
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.
Should I just buy a premium Shopify theme instead of paying for custom development?
Buy the theme if you have under roughly 500 SKUs, standard shipping rules, and no back-office systems to integrate; a $300 Theme Store theme plus a few days of configuration is the right call at that stage. Custom development earns its cost once you need wholesale pricing, product bundles, subscription logic, or an app stack that stock themes fight with. The honest test: if your requirements fit inside theme settings, do not pay someone to rebuild them.
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.
Can Shopify integrate with my ERP, accounting software, and 3PL?
Yes. NetSuite, QuickBooks, Xero, ShipStation, ShipBob, and Klaviyo all have proven connectors, and anything without one can be wired through the GraphQL Admin API with custom middleware. Connectors run on monthly app fees, while a custom two-way sync typically costs $3,000 to $15,000 depending on order volume and edge cases like partial refunds and split shipments. Have the full integration list priced in the original quote, since bolting it on later is where budgets blow up.
What tech stack should a competent Shopify developer be using?
Liquid with Online Store 2.0 JSON templates and sections, Shopify CLI for local development, Git for version control, and the GraphQL Admin and Storefront APIs for anything custom. Custom apps are typically Node or Ruby with React and Polaris for the admin UI, and headless builds use Hydrogen, Shopify's Remix-based framework. If a candidate describes editing theme code inside the online admin editor as their workflow, keep looking.
What are the biggest mistakes first-time software buyers make?
Choosing the lowest bid, paying more than 30-40% upfront instead of on milestones, skipping a written specification, and having no maintenance plan for after launch. The most expensive of the four in Digital Heroes rescue projects is the missing spec: without written acceptance criteria, done becomes an argument instead of a checklist, and every disagreement resolves in the vendor's favor. Fix those four and you have avoided most of the ways these projects fail.
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/.
Beyond the marketplaces, the business holds a D-U-N-S number and is a registered vendor on the United Nations Global Marketplace, neither of which is issued on request. Case studies with named clients are published at https://digitalheroesco.com/case-studies/. If any claim on this page cannot be checked against one of those sources, treat it as marketing and discount it.
