Super interesting thread with lots of insightful responses! Thanks Timothy! Here’s my 2 cents. Theme store themes are packaged and distributed for a merchant audience, not agency/developer audience. It’s compiled code. We don’t develop our themes that way, why should you? I build themes with well scoped theme components, Figma files, docs, CI, and workflows. All of these help us ship faster and at a higher quality. Why should you need to do these things yourself when they’ve already been solved or can be iterated from something that already exists? Themes are GIANT projects. Building a world class buying experience that checks all the boxes of quality and functionality from scratch just doesn’t make sense. If there was a design and development environment that gave you everything you needed, without limiting the final product you’re trying to deliver, why would you chose to not use it? If any of this resonates with you, you’re going to want to follow what we’re doing at Archetype Themes 👇 https://lnkd.in/ekQesRAD
A topic we've been debating internally at Your Basket Is Empty is custom versus of the shelf Shopify themes. Rewind to 2018 and my perspective was clear. Custom all the way. Sure, you can tweak an off the shelf theme. In fact, I created a new service line at WMW designed for this very use case - 'semi custom'. For a brand that was in between off the shelf and custom. But the 'tweaks' were always just 'a little more' which rendered the concept useless and we canned the service in favour of custom only. But in 2024, I'm revisiting my perspective. Is custom worth it? Shopify has spent a zillion dollars in R&D, Dawn is great, you're not locked into a framework that will need rebuilding or refactoring in 3 yrs and maybe the cost of a custom framework could be better spent on something else? Insert commerce's hottest acquisition and retention topic - brand marketing? I'll caveat this thesis with 'there is no perfect answer!!!'. The custom versus off the shelf also depends on the type of brand. Some brands just don't like off the shelf, usually because they want full design and creative control. And that is a competitive advantage. And there is also still hybrid options. One doesn't need to go 'fully custom'. But I'm bullish on off the shelf. With the right creative, brand, colour palette, font - and of course, a killer product - I reckon you can make it work. Thomas, Adam, Jordan, Piers, 🧔🏻 James, Paul - thoughts #commerce
