Sethi Couture

Sethi Couture sells fine jewelry, and most of it is designed to be worn stacked: diamond bands, black diamonds in the Noir line, bridal sets. When I started in April 2024 the store was already on Shopify, running a paid theme that no longer matched how the founder wanted the brand to look.

I worked directly with the founder, from the first design conversations through launch and the maintenance after it.

Rebuilding on Dawn

We didn’t keep patching the old theme. We rebuilt the store on Dawn, Shopify’s own theme, and customised it to the new design. Dawn is lean and stays current with Shopify’s platform updates, which mattered for a store I’d be maintaining afterwards. The custom design lives in Dawn’s own sections, custom Liquid blocks and a small set of stylesheets, so a Dawn update does not fight it.

Alongside the theme we built a custom Shopify app for the store.

The app exists because of stacks. Shopify thinks in single products, and a stack is a group of them that the customer sees as one piece of jewelry. The app sits between the two: it knows which bands belong to which stack, and the theme asks it for that instead of hard-coding stacks into templates. A new stack from the founder goes into the app, and the theme picks it up without a code change.

The stacking problem

Stacks are the brand’s centrepiece. On the site, each stack (Stack No. 28, for example) is a collection of individual bands. Each band has its own options, usually Metal and Size, with up to 20 variants on the busiest bands. A customer buying a whole stack has to pick metal and size for every ring in it.

Asking for a metal and a size on every band, one at a time, is where a stack sale would die. So the stack page asks once. The customer picks a metal and a ring size for the whole stack, the page resolves the matching variant on each band, and adds them to the cart together in one request. Anyone who wants a mixed-metal stack can still change a single band before adding.

The fiddly part was bands that don’t come in every combination. If one band has no rose gold, the stack page has to say so before the customer hits the button.

Each stack also has its own product template, with the bands in that stack listed and linked, and a three-step “build your Sethi stack” guide that points to the signature, classic and stacking band collections. Stack of the Month is a tag, and the badge and spotlight follow the tag.

Rules that live in tags

A lot of what a product page says is decided by the product’s tags, so the founder controls it from the admin without asking me:

• In Stock shows “ships in 2 to 3 business days”. Without it the page says “made to order, ships in 6 to 8 weeks”.
• Archive marks a product as final sale.
• An engraving tag (Engraving5, Engraving15 and so on) adds an engraving field to the product form, with that number as the character limit. The engraving travels with the order as a line item property.
• The SKU shows on the page as the style number.

Speed

Speed was the other hard part. Jewelry stores are image-heavy, and a store this size also runs apps for search and filters, email, a wishlist, financing and virtual try-on, each adding script to the page.

Dawn gave us a fast starting point, so the work was mostly not undoing it. Product card images go through Shopify’s image CDN with Dawn’s srcset of widths from 165 to 1066 pixels, so a phone doesn’t download a desktop photo. Images below the fold load lazily. Every app that wanted to inject script got checked against what it did for the store.

After launch

From launch until February 2025 I maintained the whole store and the app.

That meant new collections and stacks as the founder released them, campaign pages like Stack of the Month, holiday and gift guides, and keeping the theme and the app working as Shopify and the third-party apps shipped updates.