Penningtons

Challenges

The biggest challenge was building a flexible subscription model within Shopify. Out of the box, Shopify’s tools for repeat orders and subscriptions are limited, and integrating third-party apps often creates friction or locks clients into rigid workflows.

To address this, I developed a custom Shopify plugin to handle recurring orders. This gave customers the ability to fully control their subscriptions – pausing, skipping, or adjusting deliveries as needed – while keeping the workflow simple for Penningtons’ team to manage. The custom build also reduced reliance on external apps, keeping costs down and ensuring the solution was future-proof.

CMS

The CMS is Shopify, powered by Ruby on Rails and using Liquid as its templating language. The site was built using Timber, Shopify’s starter theme framework, which provides a structured foundation for theme development and customisation.

Frontend

The frontend was developed with vanilla TypeScript, HTML, Handlebars, and SCSS. I created a fully custom Shopify theme tailored to Penningtons’ branding and product presentation. Component testing was handled with Vitest to ensure consistent behaviour and cross-browser reliability.

Development and deployment were managed with Shopify Theme Kit, which provides a command-line interface for working with Shopify themes. This setup allowed for a smooth developer workflow, including:

• theme watch – automatically uploads changes in real time during development
• theme download – syncs down the current live theme for local work
• theme update – pushes local changes to the live Shopify store

Shopify’s infrastructure handles the production hosting, while these Theme Kit commands ensured efficient versioning and streamlined updates without disrupting the live store.