Browns Shoes: a new Shopify storefront and custom retail app

Footwear needs more than a product grid

A shoe is a size, a color, a fit, and a location-specific inventory decision. Customers need useful ways to narrow a large assortment, understand the product, and move from browsing to an actionable purchase. That experience also needs to work in both English and French.

SDG built a custom Shopify Liquid storefront with an emphasis on product discovery and footwear-specific detail. The implementation brings together campaign-led merchandising, collection filtering and sorting, predictive search, product galleries, size guides, color selection, and product reviews.

• Bilingual interface content and shopping journeys for English- and French-speaking customers.
• Collection navigation, filters, and sorting for a multi-brand footwear assortment.
• Product galleries, size information, and color relationships to support product selection.
• Availability and store-selection interfaces tied to the customer’s selected product variant.

Custom engineering behind the purchase

The storefront is only part of the build. SDG also developed a custom Shopify app and extensions to connect Browns’ retail requirements with Shopify’s checkout, customer accounts, and fulfillment capabilities.

The inventory and fulfillment work distinguishes stock at a store from stock available through a distribution center. Pickup logic considers whether a location can fulfill the pickup cart, while delivery logic accounts for Browns’ shipping eligibility rules. These are different operational questions, and the implementation treats them that way.

• Store and distribution-center availability connected to product and fulfillment decisions.
• Shopify Functions for inventory-aware local pickup and ship-to-store options.
• A custom carrier-service integration for Browns’ delivery rules.
• Localized checkout messaging for pickup expectations.
• Customer account extensions for registration, preferences, and order information.

One program across storefront and app

Building the storefront and app together allowed SDG to work across the boundaries that usually separate brand experience from retail operations. Product selection, availability, delivery, pickup, checkout, and customer accounts were addressed as connected parts of the same shopping journey.

The approach uses native Shopify capabilities where they fit, with custom application logic where Browns’ operating model requires it. It is the same principle behind SDG’s broader enterprise work: the platform should serve the business, without every business rule becoming a workaround in the storefront.

Live on Shopify

Browns Shoes launched its new Shopify experience on September 9, 2026. The launch brings a custom bilingual storefront and retail application work together for one of Canada’s established footwear names.

For retail teams planning a similar program, explore our enterprise Shopify practice, checkout and extension capabilities, and fashion and apparel work.