Wrapping a live Shopify store in a content layer marketing owns
LeetDesk makes premium, highly customizable gaming desks. We engineered the headless content layer of their store: the Prismic CMS architecture and the Next.js data pipeline that wrap immersive storytelling around live Shopify products, pre-rendered for speed and editable without a developer.
See it live at leetdesk.com
Challenges and solutions
Getting bespoke storytelling out of a transactional platform
The challengeShopify is a powerful transactional engine for inventory, carts and checkout, but it gets restrictive the moment you want highly visual, bespoke page layouts. A premium brand needs both, and fighting Shopify's page builder for every campaign is not a strategy.
What we shippedWe decoupled the content from the commerce. We designed a Prismic schema purpose-built for e-commerce storytelling and modelled it as reusable Slices: feature grids, testimonial sliders, full-width video sections, lifestyle imagery blocks, accessory carousels, specification grids and FAQ accordions.
Making two systems look like one page
The challengeSplitting content and commerce solves the authoring problem and creates a presentation one. If the storytelling and the buying experience feel like two systems stitched together, the premium positioning falls apart at exactly the moment the customer is deciding to buy.
What we shippedWe wrote the frontend logic that pulls live product data from Shopify, the pricing, variants, configurator and customize action, and renders it seamlessly alongside the rich media served from Prismic. The result is a single unified page where the commerce and the storytelling read as one product.
Staying fast while the content stays fresh
The challengePulling from two APIs on every request is how a premium store ends up slow, and slow costs both ranking and conversion. But content the marketing team cannot see go live is content they stop bothering to write.
What we shippedThe Next.js frontend pre-renders the Prismic content on Vercel and revalidates on a schedule, so the store stays fast by default while the team's edits still reach production quickly. Fast pages mean better SEO and higher conversion, which is exactly what a premium store needs.
Taking the developer out of campaign work
The challengeEvery promotional page, seasonal campaign and product story previously routed through engineering, which capped how often marketing could ship and made small changes expensive.
What we shippedBecause every block is editable in Prismic, the team assembles a rich, on-brand product page by filling in content rather than touching code, and does it without hacky page builders or any risk to the layout.
Before and after
- BeforeBespoke layouts fought out inside Shopify's page builderAfterPurpose-built Prismic Slices for e-commerce storytelling
- BeforeContent and commerce feeling like two stitched systemsAfterOne unified page blending live Shopify data with rich media
- BeforeEvery campaign page routed through engineeringAfterMarketing assembling pages from blocks, on its own
- BeforeA trade-off between rich content and page speedAfterPre-rendered pages that stay fast and still update quickly
The stitch: Shopify meets Prismic
The hard part was never building either half. It was making them behave like one page. Product data has to be live, because a stale price or a sold-out variant is a broken promise. Media and layout have to be rich, because that is what a premium desk is being sold on.
We delivered this as part of the production team building the store, owning the CMS architecture and the data pipeline that joins the two sources.
The headless content layer gave LeetDesk the best of both worlds: Shopify's reliable commerce underneath, and complete creative freedom on top. The store loads fast, ranks well and converts, and the marketing team ships immersive content without ever waiting on engineering.
Technology stack
Is Shopify capping how your brand looks?
We gave LeetDesk complete creative freedom on top of a store that still just works, with marketing publishing all of it. If your storefront is holding your brand back, let's talk.