1 file
What we were handed
A four-page Illustrator file with a logo and a swatch row — nothing else.
Case Study · Brand & Headless Commerce 
One Illustrator file. Ten days later, a store that runs itself.
Fuffalo Buck is an Omaha outdoor-humor brand — original artwork, small runs, a founder who draws everything himself. It arrived as a single Illustrator file, a font licence, and a domain that wasn’t registered yet. No store, no palette, no photos, no copy. Ten days later it was a headless Shopify storefront on its own domain: taking money, publishing itself when a product is added, and quoting custom manufacturing work.
The brief
A brand, a font licence, and an unregistered domain.
The commercial constraint shaped everything. Patches sell for $12, stickers for $4.99 — at that price a storefront can’t carry a monthly platform bill or a per-order app tax, and it can’t afford to lose a sale to a slow page.
$0
On day one
No store, no palette documentation, no product photography, no copy.
$4.99
The constraint
Sticker-price margins that can’t carry a platform bill — or a slow page.
The brand arrived with “Weird stuff for weird people.” A good line with a problem: it makes the customer audition. We rewrote it — “Weird looks good on you.” Same attitude, opposite direction: it hands the reader the compliment instead of asking them to qualify for one.
What we built
Static everywhere it can be. Live only where it must.
A storefront that costs almost nothing to run, publishes itself, and does what the platform won’t — with the checkout left to Shopify, where it belongs.
01
An identity pulled from the source, not guessed
The brand arrived as a single Illustrator file. Rather than eyeball colors from a screenshot, we rendered the artboards and sampled the exact swatches the illustrator had already drawn — so every brand color on the site is the exact value from the source file, not an approximation. When white text failed contrast on the brand orange, we used ink-black instead — the choice the artwork itself had already made.
02
Static everywhere it can be, live only where it must
Every page is prerendered and served from the edge. Exactly one thing runs per request — a small isolated component holding live price, stock, and the buy button. Checkout stays on Shopify, so payments, tax, fraud, and PCI are never the store’s problem, and a drop-ship traffic spike costs almost nothing to absorb.
03
A store that weighs almost nothing
The cart drawer, product gallery, reward meter, and quote form together ship 12 KB of JavaScript — because $4.99 stickers can’t afford to lose a sale to a slow page or carry a monthly platform bill. Product pages respond in about 180 milliseconds.
04
A catalogue that publishes itself
The founder is the illustrator, the packer, and the customer-service desk — so anything requiring a terminal would eventually stop happening. Now, adding a product in Shopify rebuilds and redeploys the whole site automatically — live in about ninety seconds, with a guard that fails loudly if the catalogue ever looks wrong.
05
A second revenue line, built in
Beyond the catalogue, a custom-manufacturing quote flow for embroidered, PVC and metallic runs — intake stored durably before it’s ever emailed — plus a two-stage reward meter (free shipping at $35, a free sticker pack at $50) that mirrors real Shopify discount rules rather than claiming them. If a discount is ever removed, the cart tells the truth instead of charging for a “free” gift.
06
We test the buy path, not just the build
Before launch we caught two silent killers: every single-variant product was unbuyable (most of a sticker catalogue), and the main shop link was serving a blank page as a 200. Neither threw an error or a log line — both were found by walking the actual buy path, and fixed so those failures now break the build loudly instead of shipping a hole.
Headless ShopifyStatic-firstEdge-hosted12KB JS totalSelf-publishing catalogueCustom-mfg quote lineServer-side cartDesign-token system
The results
A store that costs almost nothing to run.
Fourteen products across three categories, a working checkout on the brand’s own domain, and a build the founder can extend by adding a product and walking away.
12 KBTotal JavaScript — the entire store
~180 msProduct-page response time (TTFB)
8 KBHomepage HTML
~90 sTo publish a new product — no terminal needed
10 daysFrom one Illustrator file to a live storefront
$0Per-order app tax — a true headless build
Need a store that does what the platform won’t?
Whether it’s thin margins that can’t carry app taxes, a founder who can’t babysit a dashboard, or a workflow no template supports — that’s the build we do. Fast, owned, and engineered around your actual business. Let’s talk about yours.