The Task

Harris Tweed Isle of Harris sells three very different things: finished clothing and accessories, homeware and gifts, and Harris Tweed cloth for makers. These products were being sold across two separate websites, and neither organised the catalogue clearly.

Cloth products were the most challenging element. Customers need to be able to buy any length they want, a set pre-cut size or a sample, while the business needs price, stock and shipping weight to stay accurate whichever route they take. Shopify sells in whole units, so none of this works out of the box.

In their existing site, the brand story had nowhere to live. The business started with coasters cut from a single roll of tweed and grew into hats, bags and jackets, with shops across the islands. The old sites could not tell that story, show the weaving process or point customers to the shops.

We visited the family on the island in July 2025, working through research, navigation, wireframes and content with the client from June to August.

Navigation came first. We split the menu into product categories and a single story section covering the family history, the weaving process, the shops and what customers make with the cloth. Shoppers who know what they want go straight to the product. Shoppers who want the provenance find it in one place.

We treated cloth as its own project. Before any design work on the product page, we mapped the three buying routes (custom length sold by the centimetre, pre-cut and sample) against Shopify's variant, inventory and shipping model, and agreed with the client how stock would be counted and pricing would be set for these measured-quantity goods.

Honest pricing for measured-quantity goods Read Now

Design work started with a visit to the Hebrides, to see the operation first-hand and take reference from the landscape the cloth comes from. A moodboard exercise then tested several visual directions against one brief: convey the quality of the tweed and its island origin.

We started the palette with the red from the logo and expanded it into lighter and darker tones for backgrounds, type and interface states. Fine hairlines run through the layout as dividers and frames, referencing the tweed's threads and the precision needed to weave them.

A custom Shopify theme, designed and built in-house, with a section library the team manages from the theme editor. Every level of the catalogue has its own collection template, from top-level categories such as Bags, Fashion, Home Goods and Cloth down to sub-categories such as Purses & Wallets and Kitchen & Dining.

Cloth sells three ways on one product page: custom length by the centimetre, pre-cut and sample. Customers enter any length from 25cm to 5m and the price and metre conversion update as they type. Shopify holds price, stock and shipping weight per centimetre, so every cloth order arrives correct.

Selling fabric by the centimetre on Shopify Read Now

We migrated the catalogue, customer accounts and order history into one store, cleaned the data on the way in and mapped redirects from both old domains. PayPal, Stripe, GA4 and eQuip inventory tracking were connected, with Mailchimp tracking account sign-ups. The team was trained on Shopify in November 2025, ahead of launch in January 2026.

Handling product data when migrating from Ecwid to Shopify Read Now

Harris Tweed Isle of Harris now runs one Shopify store in place of two. We moved thousands of products and customer accounts and the full order history across, so returning customers keep their accounts and order history. In the first six months from launch, revenue increased 24% while orders placed grew by 41%. Since migration, organic traffic has grown by 52%, as a result of: improved site structure, site speed, landing page experience, conversion rate optimisation (up 34%) and domain consolidation, boosting search engine page rank and  domain authority.

The catalogue is now organised around how customers shop for clothing, homeware, gifts and cloth. Cloth sells by the centimetre, pre-cut or as a sample, with price, stock and shipping weight calculated on every order. The family's story, the weaving process and the shops have their own section of the site, and the team can now manage page content from the theme editor without the need for a developer.

Launch was the starting point. We continue to work with the family on the store, adding ecommerce features and refining the customer experience as the range and the business grow.