Confiserie Sprüngli already had a design customers knew. The job was not to invent a new one but to rebuild it on Shopify's Dawn theme: product pages, collection pages, navigation and animations, so the store keeps its look while gaining everything a maintained Shopify theme brings.
Tabs that hide themselves
Chocolate comes with a lot of information: ingredients, nutritional values, the legal declaration. On the product page these sit in tabs, and each tab is its own snippet. That separation pays off in two ways.
First, each tab can be changed without touching the others. Second, and more important for the people running the shop: a tab with no content hides itself. A product without nutrition data never shows a blank "Nutritional values" tab. Nobody has to remember to switch it off, product by product, and a shopper never clicks a tab that leads nowhere.
It is a small decision with a large effect on a catalogue with many products, where data is never complete everywhere at once.
The rest of the product page
- Breadcrumbs, title, price and a block for transport and delivery periods, which matter for fresh confectionery.
- A grid of cards for choosing product options, instead of a plain dropdown.
- A product video modal and a related-products block.
- Product badges, including a "New" badge driven by product data rather than set by hand.
Collections and navigation
Collection pages got a banner and breadcrumbs, a sidebar filter layout on desktop and a separate filter experience on mobile, where a sidebar does not fit. Product cards were rebuilt to match the brand's existing design. Navigation is a desktop mega menu and a mobile drawer, with a reveal-on-scroll animation as content comes into view.
Why rebuild on Dawn at all?
A fully custom theme can look like anything, and so can Dawn with enough work. The difference is what comes with it: Shopify's own theme, kept up to date, with the theme editor working the way merchants expect. Rebuilding a brand's design on top of it keeps the brand's look and the platform's foundations.
Sprüngli's site is also the only Swiss chocolatier in Switzerland's top 5,000 sites by Chrome traffic, ahead of Lindt and Cailler. A design customers know is worth keeping.