Client: Heads Up Golf (headsup.golf) — "Golf's One Stop Custom Shop": custom headcovers, hats and accessories for college golf programs and golfers who want their own.

Live: headsup.golf · lmu.headsup.golf (one of the team stores)

Heads Up sells custom team gear to college golf programs, and every program wants what a program always wants: their store. Their crest, their colors, their product set — a shop that reads official to a booster or a recruit's parent. The business, meanwhile, needs the opposite: one inventory, one checkout, one ops surface, one place to pack orders from. Running a separate Shopify store per school multiplies apps, billing and inventory sync until a four-school program needs a full-time admin.

A team-store system on a single Shopify backend:

Each school's store is data, not a build. A school's identity — crest, palette, copy, product collections — lives as structured content (Shopify metaobjects), and the theme renders a fully re-branded storefront from it. The LMU Golf Shop opens in crimson with the Lions crest and its own navigation; Pepperdine, San Diego and SMU's Swinging Pony store each read as their own shop. Adding school five is content entry, not a project.

Own address, own audience. Every team store lives on its own address and carries its own email audience — per-store Klaviyo lists, so LMU buyers get LMU emails, not a generic blast.

One backend underneath. Inventory, orders, checkout and discounts stay in the single Shopify admin the team already runs. A launch-sale banner or a product update propagates without touching four codebases.

A hub that sells the program. The Team Stores page on the main site presents each program's store as its own experience — "every program has its own story, so every team gets its own store."

The whole experience was designed first as a full Figma system — home, catalog, product, cart, team stores, brandbook, contact, all in desktop and mobile — including a team-gear customizer flow: pick the item (hat, headcovers, scorecard holders, towels), strap type, color, upload a logo, place it, see the price update, order one or a batch. The design's job was making "custom" feel effortless — the flow reads like a product page, not a form.

Store-as-data over store-as-build. The moment a school's branding is content instead of code, the growth question changes from "can we afford another build?" to "who's entering the next school's colors?" That's the difference between a design system and a template.

Official beats convenient. A team store that looks like a filtered collection page reads as merch. A store with the school's crest in the header and the school's crimson on the buy button reads as the program's own shop — and that's what a college program is actually buying.

One ops surface. Every architectural choice bent toward the same rule: the Heads Up team should never leave the Shopify admin they already know, no matter how many schools sign on.