Orient Case Study: Shopify Redesign

Japanese Watchmaking, Now on Native Shopify.

We moved Orient Watch USA from a custom Hydrogen build to a native Shopify Plus theme. Their team can now update, manage, and grow the store without waiting on a developer.

the challenges

Moving Off a Headless Build

Country-Level Access & Pricing Rules

Ten Separate Product Templates

416 Editorial Blocks to Organize

WCAG 2.1 AA Accessibility Gaps

A Cutover With Zero Downtime

THE CHALLENGE

Orient Watch USA was running on Hydrogen and Oxygen. It worked, but their team couldn't edit content, manage products, or keep up with compliance without engineering help. Moving to a native theme meant keeping everything the headless site did well and fixing what it didn't.

The geo rules alone were very specific. Every country outside the US and Canada had to be blocked, except four that could still browse and see MSRP as a compare-at price. On top of that, ten product templates had to become one, and the site had to pass WCAG 2.1 AA. The switch also couldn't cost them search rankings or product data.

THE APPROACH

We started by matching the headless site feature for feature. We only began improving things once everything worked the same way, and every improvement had to be something their team could maintain on their own.

One product template, built on metaobjects and metafields, now pulls Technical Details and Core Features for each SKU. Ten collection templates hold the 416 editorial blocks the client provided. The country-level access rules now live inside Shopify instead of custom infrastructure.

We sweated the small stuff too: breadcrumb markup, accessible color swatches, and a full 301 redirect map for launch day. It holds up across the full catalog and every market, and all of it is editable from the Shopify admin.