Every Shopify store has to settle one thing early: use Dawn, buy a theme, or build a custom one.
In 2024 I worked on three stores, and each one had a different answer. I’ll go through them in the order I would recommend them to most people.
Dawn, customised: Sethi Couture
Sethi Couture is a fine-jewelry brand. When I started there in April 2024, the store was on a paid theme that no longer matched how the founder wanted the brand to look.
We could have kept patching that theme. We rebuilt on Dawn, Shopify’s own free theme, and put a fully custom design on top of it.
I picked Dawn for two reasons. It is a lean starting point. And Shopify keeps Dawn up to date with its own platform changes. I was going to maintain this store after launch, which I did until last month, so that second reason mattered a lot to me.
By this year the catalogue had passed 600 products, each with several photos, and the pages had to stay fast with all of that on them. Product card images come from Shopify’s CDN in Dawn’s standard set of widths, from 165 to 1066 pixels, so a phone never downloads a desktop-size photo, and images below the fold load lazily.
This is my default answer. If you have a developer and a design, start from Dawn.
From a blank repo: Dūwi Beauty
Dūwi is a skincare brand. My freelance team designed the store in Figma and I wrote the theme from zero in June and July 2024. No Dawn underneath, no paid theme.
I did that because the design had its own layout, type and motion all the way through. Bending a general theme to fit it would have meant fighting that theme’s structure in every section.
It worked well there for a simple reason: the store is small. It launched with one product. A theme from scratch means you write every section yourself, and you also own everything Shopify adds later. For a small, design-led store that is fine. I would not do it for a store with a big catalogue and many apps. I wrote more about this build in a separate post.
A feature-heavy paid theme: Renaissance Jewel
Renaissance Jewel sells engagement rings, and the store runs on Ella, a paid theme with a long feature list.
A theme like this gives you a lot on day one without a developer. Filters, badges, popups, many layouts, all from settings.
What you pay for it shows up in speed. The store used only some of Ella’s features, and the unused ones still loaded their CSS and JavaScript on every page. A good part of my speed work there was turning those off one by one. I described that in the post about speeding up the store.
I don’t think a paid theme is a wrong choice. If you have no developer, it is often the only realistic one. But go through the theme settings after setup and switch off everything you don’t use.
How I would decide today
I ask who will maintain the store after launch.
If a developer will stay with the store, use Dawn and customise it. If the brand is small and the design is unusual, a custom theme is worth it. If nobody technical will be around, buy a good paid theme and keep it clean.