Best UK Shopify stores: 15 examples worth studying

Seventeen of the 100 stores in our Showcase are British, second only to the United States with 28. Fifteen of them run on Shopify and are open for orders, and those 15 are the subject of this piece. They cover coffee, hot sauce, alcohol-free beer, paint, spectacles, lip balm, fine jewellery, handbags, furniture, streetwear, designer menswear and a range of objects grown from bacteria and fungi.

Twelve of the 15 have Awwwards recognition. Four were named Site of the Day: ARK/8, Normal Phenomena of Life, Koffiracha and Martine Rose. Eight more hold Honorable Mentions. The other three, Lick, Cubitts and Lulu Guinness, have no award listed but earned their place on our own editors’ scores, and two of them share the top usability score in the group.

This is not a ranked list. Every store here was chosen for its design. What is useful is the spread of approaches, because the UK set happens to cover almost every way a small or mid-sized brand can use a Shopify store well. We have grouped them by the problem each one solves.

Making a small range feel like a world

A brand with two products has a design problem a brand with two thousand does not: there is not much to show. Several of the strongest UK stores answer that by treating the product as the centre of a campaign.

• Koffiracha sells exactly two hot sauces, both blending single-origin coffee with chilli. The site makes each one an event, with huge stacked headlines such as “Pour pour pour”, bottles moving through the type as you scroll and a lime-and-black palette carried all the way to the product page. It was Awwwards Site of the Day in December 2024 and scores 9 for design and 9 for creativity on our Index.
• Bedouin’s Daughter does the same for a single lip balm range. Grainy film footage, a heavy yellow serif wordmark and typewriter labels give it the feel of a film title sequence. Every shade can be added to the bag straight from the homepage carousel.
• Somewhere Good, a London menswear label making T-shirts, socks, bags and scarves, builds its homepage from full-bleed flat-colour panels, one per category, so a small range reads like a campaign.
• ARK/8, the London streetwear brand behind collaborations with Elden Ring and Metal Gear Solid, borrows the look of a game interface. Product details sit in notched panels either side of the model, and the footer reads out your session time, cursor position and timezone. The art direction changes with each collaboration.

The important part is what none of them gave up. Koffiracha’s product page still has a chilli-icon heat rating beside the price and an accordion covering ingredients, nutrition per 100g, caffeine, heat and sweetness. Bedouin’s Daughter has a shade switcher that groups new, limited and original shades, plus numbered ingredient notes. Somewhere Good puts size buttons directly on collection cards. ARK/8 has a size guide with garment measurements and the height and size of both models. The spectacle happens on the homepage; the product page does the selling.

What to look at: if your range is small, ask whether your homepage gives it enough presence, and then check that your product page still answers every practical question. The loud stores above are loud in the places where shoppers browse and quiet in the places where they decide.

Making a hard purchase easy

Some products are difficult to buy online. You cannot see a paint colour on a screen, try a pair of glasses on through a browser window or taste a coffee before you order it. The UK stores that sell these products are among the most useful examples in the whole Showcase, because each one has built a specific tool for its specific doubt.

Lick, the London paint and wallpaper brand and certified B Corp, lets you shop paint by colour, mood, finish or room, which suits the many people who do not know colour names. It adds a colour quiz, peel-and-stick samples with sample bundles, a digital colour chart, a paint calculator and guidance on how room orientation changes a colour. Consultations can be booked at home, virtually or in its London store. Lick scores 8 for design and 8.5 for usability, creativity and content on our Index.

Cubitts, the King’s Cross spectacle maker, offers The Speculator, a virtual try-on that puts frames on your own face. Frames come in S, M and L widths with measurements and bridge-fit filters, lens options including ZEISS coatings are set out plainly, and delivery times are listed for each lens type. It also scores 8.5 for usability.

Assembly Coffee, the Brixton roaster founded in 2015, treats each coffee as a numbered release, with a header counter showing how many it has launched. Product pages set out producer, region, variety, terroir and process as a data sheet, then recommend specific brewers ranked Best, Great and Very good, with links to buy them. Size options show price per kilo and the saving. Our editors gave it 9 for content and 8.5 for usability.

Lulu Guinness, the British handbag label best known for its lip-shaped clutch, gives exact dimensions and weight on product pages and notes what will fit inside, down to saying when a clutch will not take a phone.

What to look at: write down the single biggest reason a customer hesitates before buying from you. Then check whether your store has a tool, a page or a line of copy aimed squarely at it. Lick answers “what will it look like on my wall?”, Cubitts answers “will these suit my face?” and Lulu Guinness answers “will my phone fit?”. Each answer is specific to the product, which is why it works.

The catalogue as a gallery or an archive

A different group of UK stores sells objects that are made in small numbers or by hand, and their sites borrow from galleries, catalogues and research archives rather than from retail.

Normal Phenomena of Life is a London biodesign brand selling objects made with bacteria, algae and fungi. Every product carries a serial code and is filed by the organism behind its material, so a jacket, a lamp and a serum sit together on the same logic. A toggle lets you browse the range as a clean index or as a longer story. Product pages give organism, material innovation, limited edition batch size, collaborators and impact as much room as the price. It was Site of the Day in December 2023 and won an Awwwards E-commerce Honors award, and it scores 9 for creativity.

And Objects, a London workshop making furniture and lighting with specialist artisans, shows each chair or lamp on a plinth beneath outlined display type, in a brick-red and blush palette that runs through the navigation and the maker stories. Product pages have tabs for details, dimensions, resources, delivery and lead time, and upholstered chairs offer a customer’s own material option.

Emily Nixon makes fine jewellery by hand in Penzance. Collections are named after Cornish landscapes, high-value pieces carry deep diamond provenance, and private viewings can be booked from the site, so the store works alongside an in-person sale rather than replacing it.

What to look at: if you make things in small batches, borrow the information architecture of the world your product belongs to. A serial code, a lead time or a maker’s name tells a buyer more about value than a “premium” label does. Notice too that both And Objects and Emily Nixon offer a way to buy that involves a conversation, through custom materials or private viewings.

Bringing customers back

Several UK stores are built around the second order as much as the first. They are good examples of retention features that sit inside the design rather than on top of it.

• WatchHouse, the London roaster and café group that began in a former watch house by a Bermondsey church, ties retail, subscriptions, brew guides and its cafés together in one store. Subscribers set their own delivery schedule, an app stamp card handles loyalty, and a café finder covers London, New York and Dubai. Grind selection sits inline on product cards.
• Collider, an alcohol-free beer brewed with functional mushrooms and adaptogens, makes trying it low-risk: build-a-bundle, subscription or one-off purchase, a review score on the homepage, a referral offer and a 30-day money-back guarantee. It also has a comparison table.
• Assembly Coffee pairs its numbered releases with subscriptions, a loyalty scheme, gift options including a paid hand-written gift card, and SCA training courses in the menu.
• Tilly Sveaas, the English jewellery brand known for T-bar designs, has a build-your-own charm necklace tool, which our editors logged as a bundle builder. It makes a single necklace personal, and it sits next to a wishlist, gift cards and material filters for gold, silver, mixed metal and enamel.

Both WatchHouse and Collider were designed and built by Dash, a London studio, and the overlap shows: each store treats subscriptions and repeat buying as a core part of the page rather than an add-on.

What to look at: check where your retention features live. If the subscription option, bundle builder or loyalty scheme only appears in an app pop-up or a footer link, compare it with WatchHouse, where the schedule, the stamp card and the café finder all belong to the same visual system as the coffee.

Selling beyond the UK

A British store rarely sells only to Britain, and the UK stores in the Showcase handle international customers in a few distinct ways.

Martine Rose, the London designer label, has a country chooser covering every shipping destination and a header cart that shows the running total in the chosen currency. Lulu Guinness runs separate regional stores for the UK, the US and Japan, with a region pop-up on entry. Emily Nixon offers a currency and country selector. WatchHouse roasts in both London and New York and lists cafés in three cities, so the store has to speak to customers on two continents.

The approach can cost something. Our editors noted that on ARK/8 prices were hidden by region when they reviewed it, which is a reminder that international setups need testing from more than one location.

What to look at: open your store through a VPN or a colleague abroad and check three things: that prices show, that the currency is right in the cart and that shipping information matches the country. Martine Rose’s running total in the chosen currency is the simplest version of getting this right.

Who builds the best UK stores

The credits on these 15 projects say something about how British brands hire. Eight of the stores were built by UK studios and five by studios abroad. Lick lists no studio credit.

UK studios:

• Dash, London: WatchHouse and Collider.
• By Association Only, Cambridge: Lulu Guinness, and the Shopify 2.0 migration and theme build for Cubitts.
• Not Studio, London: brand and ecommerce design for And Objects.
• SOON_, London: design and development for Somewhere Good.
• THE BARN, London: design and build for Emily Nixon.
• Too Gallus, Glasgow: design and development for Koffiracha.

Studios abroad:

• Build in Amsterdam: ARK/8, which also won an Awwwards Developer Award.
• Studio Airport and September, both in Utrecht: design and development for Normal Phenomena of Life.
• Commerce-UI, Gdańsk: design and build for Tilly Sveaas.
• Alicia Blázquez, Madrid: design for Assembly Coffee.
• SPECIAL OFFER, Los Angeles: design and development for Martine Rose.

The remaining store, Bedouin’s Daughter, credits newkid for brand and website, with design direction from Isabel Moranta.

Two of the four Site of the Day winners in the UK group were built from the Netherlands, and one from Glasgow. The London-built stores in this group lean towards calm, practical retail. Apart from Koffiracha, the most experimental were built abroad.

What to look at: if you are a UK brand choosing a studio, look at the project pages, not just the portfolio sites. Each one shows what the studio actually shipped and how our editors scored it. If you are a studio, the brand list above is a fair picture of what British clients are buying.

Where even the best UK stores fall short

Our editors’ score notes are candid, and the gaps they found in the UK group are common ones.

• Filters. And Objects has thorough construction specs and lead times but no collection filters. Emily Nixon has the same gap, and its lower-priced product pages are brief.
• Product copy. Martine Rose pairs strong campaign imagery with what our editors called thin product copy and no size chart. Tilly Sveaas has clear sourcing detail but short product descriptions.
• Technical finish. On Collider, raw template errors surfaced in the cart code when it was reviewed.
• Ease of use against ambition. Normal Phenomena of Life and ARK/8 both score 6.5 for usability against 9 and 8.5 for creativity. Both are deliberate experiments, and both still show where originality costs some ease.

None of these stops the stores being worth studying. They are the places a strong design can still lose a sale: a shopper who cannot narrow a collection, a product page that does not say enough, a cart that shows an error.

What to look at: run your own store against this list. Can a shopper filter every collection with more than a dozen products? Does every product page, including your cheapest, describe the item properly? Does your cart render cleanly on mobile and desktop after your last app install?

A checklist from the UK’s best stores

What the strongest British Shopify stores in the Showcase have in common:

1. Spectacle on the homepage, plain answers on the product page.
2. One tool aimed at the product’s biggest doubt: a colour quiz, a try-on, a brewer recommendation, a note on what fits.
3. Information that signals value: serial codes, lead times, makers, producers and processes.
4. Retention features designed into the store, not bolted on.
5. Currency, country and shipping that work for customers outside the UK.
6. Filters and full product descriptions on every collection and every product.

You can browse all 17 UK stores, and the rest of the 100, in the Showcase, filtered by country, industry and feature. If you run or built a British store that belongs alongside these, you can submit it, and brands and studios already featured can claim their pages through membership.