Notes From Building DYNAMO Perfumes' Storefront

A launch timeline, a luxury positioning, and a Shopify theme ecosystem that didn't have an obvious starting point. This project sits at the intersection of our ecommerce development and design practice. DYNAMO Perfumes came to us with a clear brand direction — high contrast, editorial photography, a scent-as-identity positioning — and a hard launch deadline tied to a product drop campaign that was already in motion.

The constraint that shaped everything was the timeline. We had 8 weeks from kick-off to a live storefront. That rules out a fully custom headless build, which would have been technically interesting but would have missed the launch by a month. It pushes the decision toward Shopify Plus with a theme that's close enough to the target aesthetic to be worth building on, rather than against.

The Prestige theme by Maestrooo is built for exactly this positioning: editorial, high-contrast, designed for photography-led merchandising. The challenge isn't its aesthetic — it's that every luxury brand using Prestige needs it to look different from every other luxury brand using Prestige. The differentiation has to come from the photography direction, the copy voice, the specific layout choices inside the theme's customisation system, and the custom functionality added on top.

The specific merchandising and storytelling requirements that ruled out copying the obvious references. The DYNAMO brief included a scent-finder quiz — a product discovery tool that matches shoppers to fragrances based on their preference for specific scent profiles. This isn't a standard Shopify app feature. The closest apps produce results that feel generic — a grid of product recommendations with no narrative connection to the quiz answers.

The quiz needed to feel like part of the brand, not a bolted-on utility. That meant building it as a custom Shopify section, with the visual language of the rest of the storefront — the typography, the transition behaviour, the photography integration — carrying through into the quiz UI itself. The quiz's recommendation logic is also specific to DYNAMO's scent taxonomy: top notes, base notes, intensity, and occasion are the axes, and the matching algorithm isn't complex but it needs to be maintained inside the theme, not inside a third-party app that might change its API or pricing at any time.

This is the decision point where bespoke beats off-the-shelf: when the feature is core to the product experience, not peripheral to it. A generic quiz app would have been faster to implement. It would also have produced an experience that worked against the brand positioning rather than reinforcing it.

Designing a product-discovery flow that felt like part of the brand, not a bolted-on app. The quiz is a four-step flow: occasion (what setting is this fragrance for?), preference profile (a visual selection of scent families), intensity (from delicate to bold), and a result screen that shows the two or three recommended fragrances with their ingredient stories.

The design work was in the transitions. Each step needed to feel like part of a continuous experience rather than a series of separate screens. We used Shopify's native section rendering with custom JavaScript for the transition logic — a slide-in animation that carries the selected choices visually into the next step, so the user always has a sense of where they are in the flow without a progress bar that would break the editorial aesthetic.

The result screen was the most considered design decision. We led with the fragrance photography and the scent story, not with the product name and price. Add-to-cart is present but secondary. The priority is that the user understands why this fragrance was recommended for them, not just that there's a recommended product. This is the difference between a product-discovery experience and a recommendation engine — and it's the difference that luxury positioning requires.

Honest retrospective on timeline and scope — you can see the full case study for the final result. Two things would have been better with more time.

The mobile performance audit came too late. We hit our Core Web Vitals targets on desktop comfortably, but mobile CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) on the quiz flow was higher than we wanted at launch because the image-loading behaviour for the result screen wasn't fully optimised. We fixed it in the first post-launch iteration, but it should have been caught in QA.

The second is the product filtering architecture. DYNAMO launched with 12 fragrances and an expectation to expand. The filter structure we built assumed the current taxonomy — occasion, intensity, gender — without a clean path to adding a new filter axis (price range, for instance) without a theme code change. It works, but it would have been smarter to build the filtering as a more flexible data structure from the start, even at the cost of a few days' extra engineering time on the initial build.