Sundae Skate

The idea

It started with a girl on roller skates.

I had been watching The Shards, the series from Ryan Murphy based in the eighties, and one of its characters, Really Rhonda, is never off her roller skates. She and the world of that show are where this started. A skate shop was the obvious home for it. Sundae came from spelling it with an e, which turned the store into an ice cream parlor: six colorways became six flavors, so you shop for Strawberry Swirl or Mint Chip rather than for pink or green. That one letter built the brand. It set the name, the palette, the product naming and the way the entire site is navigated.

The system

Two ways to shop, one set of rules.

You can browse by flavor and see everything in that colorway together, or browse by type and see every flavor of one product. Both routes run on the same design system: one type scale, one card treatment with a hard offset shadow in that flavor's own accent color, and a grid that never changes shape between them.

The story

A shop that sounds like a person.

Most small stores feel like people and most small store websites do not. So the About page is a story rather than a summary: a first secondhand pair, skating that was never exercise, the friends who came from it, and one of them getting married in a pair of skates. The photographs sit in overlapping collages rather than a tidy grid, because that is how you would actually show someone your pictures.

The build

Custom front end. Standard back end.

The store is built headless, which means the front end and the commerce engine are separate. The front end is mine, built from scratch, so nothing about the design was decided by a theme. Every layout, every card, every colour is a choice rather than a compromise.

Shopify runs everything behind it. The owner manages products, prices, stock and orders in the standard Shopify dashboard, exactly as they would with any Shopify store, and the site picks up every change on its own. There is nothing custom to learn and nobody to wait on when something needs changing.

That is the trade most small stores never get offered: a site that looks like it was designed for them, run from a dashboard they already know.

The numbers

Fifteen megabytes down to under one.

The first build sent 15.4MB of images to phones and took 55.7 seconds to paint its largest element on a throttled connection. Converting the photography to modern formats and routing every image through proper handling brought that to a 3.6 second paint, and made the site usable away from wifi.