Visual Rebrand

UX Designer & Creative Lead · Shopify (migration + redesign)

Context

Taco Clout sat where Toyota culture meets off-road capability: hard-to-find parts and trail-ready gear for Tacomas, 4Runners, and Tundras. It was built for owners rather than shoppers, which is a real distinction. Owners already know what they want and arrive knowing more about the part than most storefronts do.

By 2024 the store had outgrown BigCommerce. Moving to Shopify would cut operating costs, scale better, and make vendor syncing far less manual. I was creative lead on the move, and rather than port the old look across, I treated the migration as the moment to rebrand.

Problem

Replatforming and rebranding at the same time means running two risks at once. The site had earned real search ranking in a narrow niche, and that ranking was the business. A page that ranked well and converted well did not need a designer’s opinion. It needed to survive the move intact.

Three things could have gone wrong, and all three were mine to manage.

• The data. Products, customer records, and order history all had to move without loss or corruption. Most of it lived in spreadsheets first.
• Brand recognition. Regulars knew the store on sight. Changing the visual identity risked making it unrecognizable to the people most likely to come back.
• The build. Design changes had to land in a live Shopify theme without breaking the things that already worked.

Approach

Audit first, design second

I audited the existing brand assets against customer feedback, analytics, and what the competition was doing, and sorted pages into two piles: the ones earning their keep, and the ones holding the store back. The first pile set the constraints. The second was where the rebrand was allowed to happen.

Keep the logo, change everything around it

The logo stayed. It was the single strongest piece of recognition the store had, and replacing it would have thrown away the one thing regulars navigated by. The palette is what got modernized, chosen to sit closer to the Toyota off-road world the customers actually live in.

Carry it through every touchpoint

A rebrand that stops at the storefront is half a rebrand. Email templates were redesigned against the new identity, so the message that arrives in an inbox looks like the site it came from.

Build and test with the people who shop there

I worked directly with the developers through the Shopify theme work, customizing layouts and getting responsive behavior right across devices rather than handing over comps and hoping. Before full launch, a small group of customers tested the site. Their feedback is what tuned the final design.

Solution

A cleaner, more confident store on Shopify that a regular still recognizes. The clearest illustration is a product page before and after: the structure that was ranking is still there, the noise around it is gone, and the part itself finally gets the room.

Impact

The ranking held, which was the whole constraint. Customer feedback singled out the look and how much easier the site was to move around, and Net Promoter Score was trending up when the store closed.

What I took from it

• A rebrand does not have to be loud. Most of the gain here came from removing friction and modernizing where it counted, not from making the store look like a different store.
• Knowing what not to touch is the skill. The pages that were already working were the ones I had to argue hardest to leave alone, including with myself.
• Sitting with the developers through the theme work is what kept the visual changes from breaking things. A handoff would not have survived this migration.
• In a niche this specific, trust is the conversion lever. Every visual cue is either earning it or spending it, and that matters most on a phone.

The store has since closed. Everything above is the work as it shipped.