From brand audit to a custom Shopify theme for British sports eyewear brand Hystride: light, colour-led and fully editable by the team.
hystride.com ↗Hystride makes sports eyewear for running, cycling and snow. Premium quality, without the premium price. It started with our brand audit. Since 29 September 2026, hystride.com has been running on a Shopify theme we designed and built.
The brief
Hystride is a British brand with a Shopify store of just over seventy products. Its main customer is a woman between 22 and 35 for whom running is a big part of life. Run club on Thursday, parkrun on Saturday. She buys her glasses on colour too, the same way she picks the rest of her kit.
The ask: a light site, bold but not traditional, and less masculine than most sports eyewear brands. Plus one hard requirement: the team has to be able to change images and copy themselves, without us.
What the audit showed
The brand audit laid the groundwork. Dated photo shoots, promo overlays on top of the imagery, and a brand story that sat outside the place where people buy. Colour was the reason this customer buys, yet the colour swatches in the store were switched off. And 64 of the 73 products had no product type, so filtering by sport or lens was impossible.
Our approach
Colour first. The homepage puts one frame front and centre, the Speed Pro, in twelve lens colours. Click a colour and the image changes with it. The swatches are flat colours, so you see what you get at a glance. Colour lives only in the lens; the rest of the site stays light and calm.
Light, but not timid. The boldness sits in the type and the photography, not in a dark background. The house typeface became Cabinet Grotesk: geometric enough for sport, but softer and less masculine than what was there before.
Choosing without guessing. A lens guide by light condition, image tiles per frame and per sport, and on the product page a fit block with the measurements of frame, lens and bridge. Only their own data, no invented scores.
The community inside the store. Worn by the club shows posts from people wearing the glasses, followed by the run club events and the brand film. That puts the brand story where people make the decision.
What we delivered
The design of the homepage, collection page and product page. A custom Shopify theme on Horizon, built with theme blocks, so the team manages every section themselves in the theme editor. The migration from the old theme, with the store, apps and products moving across. And the product data in order: product types, six metaobject definitions and a guide to filling them in.
The result
hystride.com has been running on the new theme since 29 September 2026. The store is light, colour is the first thing you see, and the team changes what needs changing themselves.
