Starting point
whyraw sells cameras for people who take the picture as it comes: no editing, no correction, "straight out of cam". That is the brand, and it was exactly what the theme couldn't show. What the brand wanted: a frontend that feels like the product, fast, opinionated, something to play with. And still everything a shop in Germany needs.
What we built
Storefront. Next.js with the Shopify Storefront API, every query typed via GraphQL codegen. Shopify stays catalog, cart and checkout. Everything customers see comes from our own code.
Features no theme offers. In the cam booth, visitors become the camera themselves: live view in the browser, a shutter, the whyraw look, a finished photo to keep. It all runs in the browser; nothing is uploaded or stored. The out-of-cam gallery shows unedited shots taken with the cameras, filterable by model. On products that aren't released yet, a camera display with a countdown replaces the usual "coming soon" and unlocks itself at the right moment.
Fast, because nothing foreign runs along. A frontend of your own means no app scripts you don't control, and no loading time that grows with every new app. In the Ahrefs site audit, the shop scores 100 out of 100.
Dependable day to day. The shop tells "nothing in the cart" apart from "Shopify isn't answering right now" and says both honestly. A dedicated test suite runs the whole shop against an unreachable Shopify address and checks what customers see.
Legal and operations. Electronic withdrawal in two steps, without a login, with confirmation to customer and merchant. Cookie settings run through Shopify's own dialog and can be reopened at any time. The forms are protected against bots.
Findable, for machines too. The shop serves a machine-readable overview of its pages and products so AI assistants describe the range correctly. Click parameters from ads and price portals survive the jump to checkout.
Result
Live after five days. From the first storefront commit on 14 May to go-live on 19 May 2026, including cart, checkout and legal texts. The imagery comes from photographer Nico Soica; the frontend is built around his pictures.
One market is live. The structure for 27 EU countries and Switzerland sits in the code; switching one on is a flag, not a rebuild.
Takeaway
Headless isn't worth it for every store. It's worth it when the frontend is part of the product. Shopify then is the dependable half in the background, and what happens up front is something no theme offers: faster, distinctive, and free of scripts nobody asked for.
