SHOPIFY STOREFRONT · MERCH
FREYA CAFE
Custom Liquid Theme · Metaobject Catalog · Development Store
rowrog Shopify locks every development store behind a password — this one is published on purpose. Pickup only, no payment provider, nothing you order is binding.
THE SPEC CAME BEFORE THE FIRST LINE OF LIQUID.
Freya is a family day-out destination — a pool, a zipline, swing cars and a cast of park animals. The shop is the merch layer imagined around that world. Most builds would have started with a theme and pushed products into it. This one started with the data model: what a product is here, which axes a customer may navigate, and which ones exist only for us.
That order is the whole point. Collections, filters, the product page and the character series all fall out of the model instead of being bolted on, which is why extending the shop is a content job rather than a developer ticket.
Said plainly: this is a development store built to prove the architecture, not a business taking orders. Nothing in it is manufactured or for sale, and every product image was generated — which is the point, because a catalog can only be modelled at full size if the catalog exists first. It ships nothing, charges nothing, and is not going live.
The theme underneath it is another matter. BOS Commerce is ours — written here, line by line, versioned across rebuilds, and the same theme that gets deployed for client storefronts. Freya is where it was put through its paces, not a one-off built for it.
WHAT'S UNDERNEATH
OUR OWN THEME
BOS Commerce is written by Black Oar Studio from the first line — layout, JSON templates, section groups and theme blocks with their own schema. No stock theme underneath, no Dawn with the colours swapped, which is why it does not read as Shopify.
TWO AXES, KEPT APART
How a product is fulfilled and which roadmap phase it belongs to live in internal metafields. Customers navigate by audience and product type instead. Logistics never leaks into the menu.
CHARACTERS AS DATA
Each park animal is a metaobject with its own art and short story, referenced by the plush, the pin, the magnet and the keychain. Extending the collectible series means adding a record — not touching theme code.
VARIANTS MODELLED, NOT TAGGED
Size and colour are real Shopify options with native swatches, never tags or free-text fields. Tagging them would quietly break filtering, per-variant stock and the product feed — the failure nobody notices until it costs a sale.
TRANSLATABLE BEFORE TRANSLATION
Every customer-facing metafield and metaobject was defined as translatable while the store was still English-only. Adding Thai is content work later, instead of a rebuild.
ONE SIZE GUIDE, REUSED
A single metaobject referenced from every garment, rather than six copies of a table that drift apart the first time a measurement changes. The same principle runs through care instructions and attractions.
THE BACKDROP
EVERY SHOP BRINGS ITS OWN.
The pattern running behind every page is not baked into the theme. Freya's is drawn from its own world — the house, the palms, the cups, the park animals — and it is what stops the storefront reading as a template with a logo dropped on it.
Your storefront gets its own, made for the brand it belongs to. Two shops can run the same theme underneath and never look like the same shop.
THE CATALOG
Apparel, headwear, drinkware, paper goods and the collectible character series — modelled as six variant behaviours rather than as a list of products. None of it exists as an item you could buy: the product imagery is generated, which is what made it possible to fill and test a catalog of this size without a photo shoot for goods nobody has made.
STACK
CLICK A TERM TO DECODE
The commerce engine behind the store. Shopify runs checkout, payments, taxes, shipping, and inventory on infrastructure that powers millions of shops worldwide.
YOUR ADVANTAGE → The parts of your store that must never fail — taking money, charging tax, tracking stock — run on proven infrastructure, not custom code.
The language Shopify themes are built in. A custom Liquid theme means the design is built natively into Shopify — every page and section stays editable in the normal Shopify admin, unlike a headless setup where storefront changes go through code.
YOUR ADVANTAGE → You run your entire store in one familiar system — no developer needed for day-to-day changes.
GO AND CLICK AROUND.
The password is rowrog — filter the catalog, open a garment, and see where the size guide comes from.
