Gieves&Hawkes
A second ground-up Shopify build for the Savile Row house. Custom-built sections replaced eight third-party apps, mobile Lighthouse climbed from 64 to 85, and £300 a month came off the app bill. Our best work to date.
Visit live siteServices
Shopify build · eCommerce consultancy · SEO · Email marketing
Stack
Shopify · Custom theme · SimplyBookMe API
Timeline
Ongoing partnership
Year
2014 to present
Gieves & Hawkes have tailored for British royalty since 1771. We rebuilt their Shopify storefront after the Frasers takeover in 2014 and have run the eCommerce side of the brand since. The most recent piece of work, a full ground-up theme rebuild, is the best we've shipped.
Chapter 01
Website
A second ground-up Shopify build. Custom-built sections replaced eight third-party apps, mobile Lighthouse went from 64 to 85, and the in-house team got a theme they own end to end.
The brief
A theme the in-house team own
The 2014 build did its job. The estate ran on it for years. But like every Shopify store that gets to age four, the app stack had quietly grown. Twelve apps for predictive search, wishlists, size guides, bundles, back-in-stock alerts, and the rest. Each one a monthly fee, a render-blocking script, and a thing that breaks when someone else updates it.
The new brief was different. Rebuild from scratch. Move every app function into the theme itself. Make every section editor-friendly so the in-house team can extend without a developer. Pull the mobile performance up. Two months, head down.
What got rebuilt
Eight apps replaced with theme code
Predictive search, size guides, wishlists that sync to Klaviyo, bundle merchandising, and back-in-stock alerts. All built natively into the theme. No third-party scripts, no app fees, no rendering layer to wait for. The pieces that used to cost £300 a month now ship as part of the codebase Gieves own.
The made-to-measure flow is the one exception. We integrated SimplyBookMe via their API so MTM appointments connect to the calendar the team already use. Booking logic stays in a tool built for it; the booking UI lives in the theme.
Mobile Lighthouse
+21
from 64 to 85
Average across home, PLP, and PDP.
Shopify apps retired
8
12 down to 4
Replaced with native theme sections.
App bill, off
£300
per month, saved
Build time
2 mo
start to finish
gievesandhawkes.com
Templates beyond the catalogue
Bespoke, made to measure, journal, heritage
The catalogue is a slice of what Gieves sell. A custom suit, a fitting at the Savile Row showroom, the journal that documents two and a half centuries of tailoring: each one needed its own template, not a sales page in costume.
Five additional template families ship with the new theme: bespoke, made to measure, journal, a heritage page with the brand's full timeline, and the showroom locator. Each one shares the theme's vocabulary but has its own pace and its own way of presenting the work.
Design, top to bottom
No templated component left behind
Every section was designed individually. The luxury web is full of stores where the homepage is considered and the PDP is the same generic Shopify component shipped with most themes. We didn't ship one of those.
Quiet typography, generous whitespace, motion that's intentional rather than busy. The same restraint applied to every page template, every block, every state.
Chapter 02
Marketing & SEO
A technical SEO foundation and content program that took the brand to #1 on Google UK for 'luxury suit'. Organic traffic compounds month on month.
SEO
From rebuild to category leader
Content, structure, links, and a technical foundation that reads cleanly to both Google and LLMs. Within months, Gieves ranked #1 in the UK for 'luxury suit'. The organic engine has compounded ever since.
Peak ranking · Google UK
#1
for 'luxury suit'
One of the most competitive terms in fashion search.
Organic clicks · first 6 months
+46%
growth
Organic impressions
2.3M
per month
Chapter 03
Consultancy
The eCommerce team Gieves don't need to hire. Ongoing strategy, platform guidance, and hands-on delivery, plugged in week to week.
Ongoing partnership
Blending into the team
Our team blends in where there are gaps in theirs. Strategic calls, specialist one-off work, and growth programs that sit outside the day-to-day but still need senior eCommerce eyes on them.
We liquify around whatever the in-house team is running. Strategy, platform decisions, and growth planning when the conversation goes bigger. Hands-on delivery when scope widens. A vetted network of marketing, design, and dev specialists pulled in per project when the work calls for it. Same consistent point of contact, shape-shifting scope.
Deliverables
Next steps
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