S&D Darting Dynamics is a specialist darts retailer in Faversham, Kent, with a shop on Salters Lane. Steve approached me to discuss making the range available online. The business had real depth in store: major brands, player collections, accessories, and the kind of product knowledge you only get from a dedicated darts shop. What it did not have was a website.
The brief was straightforward. Build a mobile first Shopify store from scratch, organise a large product catalogue properly, and make the online experience feel as serious as the physical shop. Work started on 25 April 2026.
Why this was not a small ecommerce job
A lot of ecommerce projects are really brochure sites with a buy button attached. This was not one of those. S&D sells technical products to people who know what they are looking for. Weight matters. Brand matters. Stem length matters. Flight shape matters. Get the structure wrong and the store feels amateur within seconds.
The product library was the project. The theme had to look the part, but the real work was understanding the range well enough to organise more than 750 products in a way customers can actually use.
Building the Shopify theme
I built a custom Shopify theme around S&D’s branding: dark premium styling, gold accents, strong navigation, and homepage sections that can carry brand launches, featured collections, and the core shopping paths without feeling cluttered.
The header carries the full category structure: darts, flights, points, stems and shafts, dartboards, accessories, services, and sale. Search, rewards, account access, and cart are all visible without pushing the product content down the page. On a specialist retail site, that clarity matters.
Organising 750+ products properly
This is where most of the time went. A darts shop is not one product type. It is dozens of product types, each with its own variants, brands, and buying logic. The darts collection alone runs to 242 products across ten brands, with filters for weight and brand so customers are not scrolling endlessly on mobile.
Shop by brand gives manufacturers like Winmau, Target, Red Dragon, Harrows, Shot, Mission, and Unicorn their own clear entry point. Popular categories push the most common shopping paths higher up the journey: darts, points, dartboards, surrounds, flights, lighting, scorers, and clothing.
Featured collections, such as the Target Japan launch, let new stock sit in a proper campaign space without breaking the rest of the catalogue structure.
Mobile first, because that is how people shop
Steve was clear that the store had to work on mobile. That was not a nice extra. It was the point. The mobile homepage keeps the in store offer visible too: try before you buy, directions to Salters Lane, and the trust signals a specialist retailer needs before someone commits to a purchase.
Free UK shipping over £50, returns, secure checkout, and official stockist messaging are all part of the same argument: this is a proper retailer, not a side project with a Shopify template dropped on top.
What I would take from this one
- Large catalogues expose weak thinking fast. If you do not understand the products, the navigation will show it.
- Theme design is only half the job on Shopify. Product structure, collections, filters, and merchandising do the real selling work.
- Specialist retail needs specialist information architecture. Brand, category, and variant logic have to match how customers already think about the products.
- Local shops going online still need a local story. The physical store is a trust signal. The website should use it, not hide it.
The result
S&D Darting Dynamics now has a custom Shopify store built around its actual range: more than 750 products, structured for mobile, and ready to support the business online for the first time. The site is built to launch when Steve is ready to take the password down.
Read the full case study for the complete breakdown of the build.