Way.gent: a coffee store rebuilt to the pixel, that you can shop by taste
Way is a specialty coffee brand in Ghent: a roastery, physical locations, a barista academy, and a webshop selling coffee, equipment, and subscriptions. The team arrived with a complete design and a store that could not carry it, a legacy Debut theme with page-builder layouts that made every change slow. We rebuilt it from the ground up on Dawn with fully custom sections, matched the design exactly, and built discovery around how coffee drinkers actually choose: by taste.
Executive Summary
The design existed. The store could not carry it.
Way's brand is bold and considered, and the team knew exactly what they wanted the store to look like: they arrived with a complete design. The store they had ran on the legacy Debut theme, predating Shopify 2.0, with key pages assembled in a page builder that made every layout change slow and kept a tool sitting between the brand and its own platform. The brief was direct: rebuild it properly, match the design exactly, and make browsing feel effortless without making the brand feel commercial.
We redeveloped the store from the ground up on the Dawn theme with fully custom sections, replacing the legacy foundation and retiring the page builder entirely. The client's design was implemented pixel-perfect: same typography, same hierarchy, same motion language, now native to Shopify instead of layered on top of it. On that foundation we built the discovery layer the catalog deserved: a multi-level mega menu, interactive flavor profile sliders filtering coffee in real time, purpose-built equipment filters, and modal quick add with instant cart updates. Klaviyo, Judge.me, Recharge, and Search & Discovery were integrated as the operating layer behind it.
Client at a glance
- Specialty coffee · Ghent, Belgium
- Roastery, cafes, barista academy, webshop
- DTC plus subscriptions and workshops
- Migrated from Debut to Dawn (Shopify 2.0)
What we delivered
The Challenge
Structural, not cosmetic
The Debut theme predates Shopify 2.0, cutting the store off from modern section architecture. The workaround, building pages in a page builder, had become the problem. And the shopping experience was underserving a serious catalog: specialty coffee is a taste decision, but the store could only offer category lists.
A pixel-perfect mandate
The design existed and it was the contract: same fonts, same sizes, same movement. The build had to reproduce it exactly within Shopify's architecture, not approximate it with a theme's defaults.
Retiring the page builder without losing capability
Every builder-dependent page, including the blog, needed a native replacement the team could maintain faster than before.
Taste is not a category
Shoppers choose coffee by intensity and flavor character. Stock Shopify filtering offers tags and checkboxes, not a way to say medium intensity, fruity, low acidity and see matching coffees instantly.
Deep catalog, effortless browsing
Coffee, espresso, filter, pods, subscriptions, machines, brewers, grinders, and a long tail of equipment: the navigation had to make the whole range legible and keep shoppers moving forward, not backing out.
User-friendly without becoming commercial
The explicit brief was to keep the store's bold character while removing friction. Convenience patterns had to be designed into the brand's language, not pasted on.
Research & Strategy
Fix the foundation, then treat discovery as the product
The strategy followed the brief's own logic. First, move to Dawn and Shopify 2.0 with fully custom sections so the design could be implemented natively and the page builder could go. Second, build discovery around taste, the way coffee drinkers actually think. Third, keep the operating stack lean and wired into the build rather than bolted alongside it.
The build roadmap
The Build
Fully custom sections, and a catalog you can talk to
The usual migration keeps the builder, restyles the theme around it, and inherits the same slow layout changes with a new coat of paint. We rebuilt everything natively instead.
From page builder to fully custom sections
The store was redeveloped as fully custom sections on Dawn, implementing the client's design pixel-perfect: typography, sizing, hierarchy, and movement. The blog moved to a native template built via pages, replacing block-by-block builder assembly with a structure the team can publish into directly.
A mega menu that maps the whole range
A multi-level mega menu with organized product categories and smooth hover animations gives the full range, coffee and its brew formats, equipment from machines to tampers, subscriptions, and gift cards, a single legible map. The menu itself teaches the store's structure.
Shopping coffee by taste
A custom filter system built around flavor profiles: interactive sliders for intensity, fruitiness, sweetness, and acidity filtering products in real time as they move, with coffee intensity on a professional range slider from None to Very High. Shoppers describe the cup they want; the catalog answers.
Filters for the rest of the catalog
Checkbox-based filtering purpose-built for the equipment side: coffee machines, grinders, brands, and workshop types, integrated with Search & Discovery so results stay fast and accurate across the full catalog.
Quick add and frictionless browsing
Modal-based quick add to cart from the overview level, with instant cart updates and bulk quantity management. Combined with navigation that returns shoppers to product groups rather than the top of the store, browsing keeps its momentum from first click to cart.
The operating layer
Klaviyo for email sequences and form submissions, Judge.me for reviews, Recharge for subscription management, and Search & Discovery powering the advanced filtering, each integrated within the store's design language rather than sitting on top of it.
Event-driven and orchestrated in the cloud: every step independently observable, retryable, and parallel.
What Worked
The bets that paid off
Each bet was judged on the live store and the team's day-to-day workflow.
Removing the page builder entirely
Replace builder-dependent layouts with native sections, exactly to the design.
- Fully custom Dawn sections
- Exact fidelity to typography and motion
Result
Faster changes, exact fidelity, no middle layer between the brand and its platform.
The blog via native pages
Cut the time-consuming block-by-block publishing workflow.
- Native blog template
- Publishing reduced to writing
Result
The workflow went from block assembly to simply writing.
Advanced filters for coffee, equipment, and brands
Give a deep specialty catalog discovery worthy of it.
- Taste sliders with real-time results
- Structured equipment filters
Result
Proved that specialty-grade discovery works inside Shopify.
The advanced custom mega menu
Make the store's structure legible at a glance.
- Multi-level range map
- Smooth hover animations
Result
Made the store and its categories immediately clearer to shoppers.
Why It Worked
Fidelity and experience, without trading one for the other
The build honored the two things the client cared about most and refused to compromise either.
The design was treated as a specification
Shopify 2.0 with fully custom sections made it possible to hit the design exactly while removing the page builder that had been standing in for real architecture.
Discovery was rebuilt around how people buy coffee
By taste, with navigation and quick add designed to keep shoppers moving forward instead of backing out to menus.
Friendly, never generic
Convenience patterns were designed into the brand's own language, so the store got easier to browse while staying unmistakably Way.
Results
The store finally matches the brand
No performance metrics are published for this engagement; every result below is a structural fact of the delivery.
Pixel-perfect to the design, builder-free, and shoppable by taste
Foundation
Layout changes
Coffee discovery
Path to cart
Client Feedback
In the client's words
I found them very technical in Shopify and the level of their communications is outstanding. They know how to fix the critical technical parts and do pixel perfect implementation.
Yassine
Way.gent
Common Questions
What this means if you have a design and need it built exactly
Translation, not vision. Most builds approximate a design with a theme's defaults and the brand pays for it. Treating the design as a specification, and building fully custom sections on Shopify 2.0, gets exact fidelity now and faster changes forever.
Have a design that deserves a proper build?
We build Shopify stores to the pixel: custom sections, no page builders, no compromises on the brand. Fixed price proposal after one call.