Kamp Grizzly Achieves Denim Tears’ Vision for Storytelling-Infused Commerce

Challenge

Artist and designer Tremaine Emory wanted a reimagined website experience for his apparel label Denim Tears. The website would need to be highly immersive, incorporating storytelling in the home page, product detail page, and throughout the shopping experience. It would also need to be easily updated by his team. The Shopify Creators Program connected Tremaine with the independent agency Kamp Grizzly to push the limits of storytelling and shopping with the new Denim Tears’ website.

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Solution

To deliver such a unique vision without compromising performance or the customer experience, Kamp decided to build the site headless. The team used Shopify’s new React-based framework Hydrogen and hosting solution Oxygen to build a robust visual system that was interactive yet responsive and performant. They designed many elements, including a home page collage, an abstract product landing page grid, a component that would archive collections, and a museum-esque product detail page that would integrate with the archival component. Rich media like 3D objects and playlists would transition across pages, connecting stories throughout the site.

Results

Kamp saved time they'd otherwise spend integrating with Shopify by leveraging Hydrogen’s ready-to-use React components, hooks, and utilities. Hot reloading made development faster, since the team could instantly see their changes, and optimizing the storefront for a fast user experience was simpler with Hydrogen’s combination of caching strategies and streaming server-side rendering with Suspense. Then the team could deploy to Oxygen and share their progress with Denim Tears as they worked. The team also ensured Denim Tears would be able to easily manage and update their site for the long term. A custom-developed Sanity CMS would allow Denim Tears to activate certain site features by simply flipping a switch. Denim Tears would also be able to experiment with variations of the website on different development servers and immediately make a change in the frontend. This CMS would give them more control over their content, letting them try new things before deploying live. Kamp’s technology and design teams worked together to deliver an incredibly creative user experience with a high-performing and easy-to-manage site.