How Brand42 Launches Timothy London’ Storytelling-Infused Storefront with Weaverse & Hydrogen
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a brand in possession of a great vision must be in need of a stellar digital experience.
Such was the case with Timothy London, a premium British travel goods brand, and their vision to immerse their customers into their world with beautiful storytelling and aesthetic finesse. It was an ambitious vision, by all means. This was where Brand42, a prominent London-based design and digital agency, came into play.
About Brand 42
Brand42 is a prominent London-based design and digital agency, well-known for delivering strategic branding solutions to premium brands like BBC, Johnnie Walker, Rakuten, and Top Gear. At the heart of their success is the innovative One-Team Approach.
With the One-Team Approach, Brand42 seamlessly integrates its creative and development teams from the outset, fostering a collaborative environment where developers contribute to functional decision-making early in the process. This ethos of collaboration enables Brand42 to deliver tailored, innovative solutions that transform their clients’ visions into immersive realities, driving impactful results.
Brand42’s commitment to customization is further exemplified by its technology-agnostic approach. They don't limit themselves to specific stacks like WordPress or Shopify. Instead, they choose the best tools for the job. For the Timothy London project, Brand42 knew that the complex requirements and unique brand personality required a headless approach.
The Challenges: Steep learning curve and Herculean development effort
Timothy London is building a one-of-a-kind brand for travelers. They combine superior design and engineering excellence to bring out a product that can truly be THE travel companion of a lifetime - offering comfort, ease of use, utility, and just a bit of flair, wherever the travelers go. With its new website, the brand wanted to find a way to translate these unique physical qualities into the digital space.
It’s a challenging goal for Brand42. How do you tell such a unique story in the digital space while keeping the shopping experience fast and functional, optimized for both desktop and mobile, supporting videos and 3D images, and enabling discovery through movement?
The answer is headless, and to be more precise,Shopify Hydrogen.
Yet, going headless is not the silver bullet. Despite how feature-rich and powerful Hydrogen is, it wasn’t all smooth sailing for the Brand42 team. They found quite a learning curve with Hydrogen and Remix as this is their first project using this framework. Additionally, the nascent state of Hydrogen meant a limited availability of 3rd-party apps and plugins. This meant they had to develop a lot of features from scratch.
Secondly, Brand42 development team also found Shopify Hydrogen to be particularly quite limited in the setup of page layouts, hindering their efforts to achieve a more flexible, fluid design layout that they’ve planned, for example, Hydrogen lacked the drag-and-drop module functionality that they are accustomed to in other Content Management Systems. In an ideal world, they should have the best of both worlds - the performance and extensibility of Hydrogen, and the user-friendliness that comes with a drag-n-drop editing experience.
Turned out the ideal world is just one app away.
Without Weaverse, we feel like Hydrogen was in beta.
— Harry F. Senior Designer at Brand42
They discovered Weaverse while researching alternatives that offered more flexibility than Shopify’s rigid structure. Weaverses allows development teams to build Hydrogen stores much faster by providing SDKs and pre-made templates, while also supporting a drag-and-drop framework, allowing Brand42’s clients considerable control over their content without the usual constraints.
The Solution: Weaverse, the first theme customizer for Hydrogen
Brand42 chose Weaverses as it’s the only solution on the market that could offer what they needed to meet project requirements:
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A more CMS-like content editing experience within Shopify Hydrogen, which made it easier for everyone to manage and edit content.
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SDKs and templates to facilitate easy development of components and seamless integration with Shopify's backend.
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Flexible route structure that allows for custom nested pages, aligning perfectly with child pages in the site structure.
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Custom markets and localization features, including an automatic copy-to-locale functionality developed at the development team's request.
These unique advantages made Weaverse the ideal solution for the Timothy website project. But that’s not all. What stood out to Brand42 was Weaverse's integrated support - echoing their own One Team Approach ethos.
When I found you guys, you only had one review. Five stars, but it’s just one review and for me, it was a bit suspicious.
But when I started and got all this kind of support to make all these pages really manageable, to build something new and custom, it made me feel confident that it’s possible to deliver this project.
— Jev S., Senior Web Developer
Weaverse team provided a dedicated Slack channel, offering quick problem-solving, continuous support, and 24/7 assistance. This close collaboration helped Brand42 quickly fix bugs, implement custom features on time, and stress-test new functionalities, allowing them to achieve the client’s requirements and meet deadlines.
Our experience working with Weaverse has been excellent!
What stood out to me very often when you're working with software as a service providers is that it can feel a bit like a faceless organization. There's no point of contact that you can get hold of. It was quite the opposite with you guys. You were quite happy to have face to face interactions, put a name to a support issue and were reactive in terms of requests.
There are other CMS we've used, and if you find a bug and it gets logged in the pipeline for 12 months before they'll even look at it. But it’s completely different with Weaverse. I think even the communication chain went from Jamie or I saying to Jev, can we achieve this? And then Jev saying, I'll speak to Paul. And then within 10 minutes or so we have a response, which was just unheard of in terms of our support response that we've been used to.
— Jamie H. Project Director at Brand42
The Result: Elevated brand experience went live in time for the international product launch
With Weaverse, building a Hydrogen storefront was faster and easier.
Brand42 team was able to streamline their workflow using Weaverse components. Additionally, they could easily improve the quality of their page layouts to match designs, thanks to Weaverse’s intuitive drag-and-drop functionality. This resulted in the successful launch of Timothy London’s storefront. The new website is fast, interactive, and pixel-perfect. The shopping experience feels immersive and smooth, allowing users to explore and discover the products effortlessly.
We've experienced major improvements in efficiency and productivity with Weaverse. The Pilot theme provided an excellent foundation for developing our Hydrogen theme, which saved us valuable time and effort!
[..]
We're very satisfied with our experience with Weaverse and certainly recommend their services. We look forward to continuing our collaboration to further enhance Timothy's website and for future projects.
— Jev S., Senior Web Developer
For development agencies like Brand42, diplomacy is of utmost importance.
Clients might change their minds, ask for last-minute iterations, or see a different option. The success of a development agency depends on how flexible it can adapt to these requests and feedback.
As an award-winning design agency, Brand42 team wants to manage clients’ expectations with tact and diplomacy. For that, they need a design tool that’s flexible enough, and Weaverse fits nicely into this vision. Weaverse allows the design team to quickly iterate the website in response to clients’s feedback, making it easier for the strategy team to live up to client expectations and build a long-term relationship.
As an agency, we like to be quite flexible.
Sometimes when a client changes their mind, or wants to see a different option, or wants to iterate, we won’t say no. We're not the sort of agency that says no, or brings out a timesheet to review and say why we're not going to do that.
So having the tools that allowed us to react to some of that feedback through the course of the project was really useful, especially when it doesn't limit the design team in terms of how they can respond to that feedback. From a client management perspective, it allows us to kind of live up to what our clients expect from us.
— Jamie H. Project Director at Brand42
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Building A Blazing Fast Shopify Store: Liquid or Hydrogen?
Someone once told me, “You don’t really need your website to go that fast.” I knew what they meant. I’d just spent five seconds waiting for Song for the Mute’s homepage to load. By any standard metric, that’s slow. But I didn’t care. When you’re browsing one of the coolest brands on the internet, and you really want to buy, you’re not timing it. You’re in it. You’re immersed. You’re seeing poetry, storytelling, and fashion blending perfectly together! But most stores aren’t Song for the Mute. And if your brand doesn’t have that kind of magnetic pull yet, performance matters — a lot. Google called it out years ago in their “Milliseconds Make Millions” report. Even today, 82% of users say slow speeds affect their purchasing decisions, and a 1-second improvement in page speed can yield an extra $7,000/day for a $100k/day site. Things haven’t changed. Now, if you're using a traditional Shopify theme, built on Liquid and your site feels sluggish, your first instinct might be to install a performance app. Don’t. Most of them do more harm than good. Others might suggest going headless. I build for Shopify Hydrogen, and even I’ll say this: don’t rush. Can Shopify Liquid Perform Well? Absolutely. Shopify published their own study in late 2023 showing that Liquid storefronts outperform most ecommerce platforms in Core Web Vitals. As of September 2023, 59.5% of Shopify sites passed all CWV thresholds, a stat that continues to climb. Even large-scale merchants like Rothy’s, Rad Power Bikes, and Dollar Shave Club use Liquid and still hit performance benchmarks. Surprisingly, Liquid even outperforms most headless implementations. Shopify found that many SSR frameworks — the ones powering most headless setups — had fewer sites passing Core Web Vitals compared to Liquid. Hydrogen ranked second, but there’s still a gap. So why invest millions in building Hydrogen? Just why? Hydrogen vs Liquid/Shopify Themes A Rebuttal Against Liquid First, I have to say that it might be hard to compare apples to apples in this case, mainly because the data in Shopify’s benchmark focuses on real storefronts using Hydrogen. Many of these early adopters built custom experiences without performance best practices. In contrast, Liquid storefronts benefit from: Years of optimization by Shopify's core teams Default themes like Dawn that are tightly optimized A templating model that constrains performance pitfalls Hydrogen, on the other hand, gives full freedom. Yes, this freedom cuts both ways; it brings performance potential and risk of poor implementation. Hydrogen storefronts can match or exceed Liquid performance when built well. Shopify’s own documentation even notes: “Some routes in the Hydrogen demo store template saw their load time cut in half” after optimizing GraphQL queries. Hydrogen is built on React Server Components (RSC) and uses Vite for ultra-fast development. Shopify chose this stack specifically because: RSC reduces client JS bundle size significantly Pages stream in progressively with lower Time to First Byte (TTFB) Data fetching is done on the server, not in the client render phase You get full control. You also get full responsibility. That’s why some Hydrogen stores load in half the time, and others fall flat. When Should You Consider Hydrogen? Page speed shouldn’t be the only factor in deciding between Shopify Hydrogen and Liquid. The real choice comes down to how much control you need over your storefront experience. If you’re planning to run A/B tests, personalize content, or build dynamic user interfaces, you’ll hit the limits of Liquid fast. Hydrogen is built for that kind of flexibility. It’s designed for brands that want to iterate quickly, experiment often, and optimize every touchpoint. On the other hand, Liquid works well for stores that prioritize simplicity and stability. Its guardrails are a strength if your store setup is relatively fixed, maybe with just a few campaign landing pages here and there. Use Hydrogen if: Your store has 500+ SKUs or 100K+ visits/month, and you’re seeing speed decline. You need to launch experiences that your theme can’t handle: multi-currency PWA, AR tools, immersive UIs. Your team (or agency) is fluent in React and headless workflows Stick with Liquid if: You’re validating a new product or category All your needs are covered within the theme editor, and your site already performs well You don’t have the engineering support to maintain a custom frontend The TL;DR In short, Liquid gives you structure. Hydrogen gives you freedom. Choose based on how far you plan to push your storefront. How To Build Hydrogen Storefronts Faster? One of the biggest reasons developers hesitate to go headless is that it breaks the visual editing experience. The Shopify Theme Editor disappears. Content teams are locked out. Everything becomes a Jira ticket. Weaverse fixes that. With Weaverse Hydrogen, developers can build Hydrogen themes and components via an SDK, expose them in a familiar drag-and-drop editor, just like Shopify Theme Editor, and let content teams reuse, remix, and publish without touching code. And it's only getting easier. With Weaverse AI, the gap between idea and execution shrinks dramatically. Developers will soon be able to turn Figma design into Hydrogen landing pages using Weaverse and Figma MCP. Merchants will soon be able to edit their Hydrogen storefronts using a natural language interface. If you’re interested in Weaverse AI, let me know here, and I’ll reach out once it’s ready!
The Future of Building with Shopify: Hydrogen and AI
Building An Online Store: Then & Now Let’s start with a story. A history lesson, perhaps. It is 1999. Your boss tells you the company needs an online store. You nod gravely and call your web guy. He nods back and disappears for six months. You don’t hear from him again until he returns with 10,000 lines of spaghetti PHP, a MySQL database held together with duct tape, and a shopping cart that breaks when you add more than three items. You launched anyway. The homepage has dancing gifs. The checkout form requires 12 fields. Half of your customers abandon their carts. You get one sale a day. But hey you’re a dot-com entrepreneur now. It is 2007. Your boss tells you the company needs an online store. You go to Magento and download the open-source package. You spin up a server, start following a forum thread with 43 pages titled “Help: Checkout Broken!” and spend the next few weeks configuring payment gateways, plugins, cron jobs, and SSL certificates. You hire a developer to customize the theme. He hardcodes your logo into the footer and disappears. You hire another developer to undo what the first one did. The store launches. It’s not great, but it works. Kind of. At least until the next security update. It is 2016. Your boss tells you the company needs an online store. You open Shopify. It takes you 45 minutes to get to your first product page. You feel powerful. You don’t need a developer. You need a laptop and a credit card. You buy a theme. You connect Stripe. You install a bunch of apps that each solve one extremely specific thing: reviews, popups, upsells, abandoned cart reminders, shipping rate calculators, order printers, email sequences, and chat widgets. It’s a Frankenstein monster of app integrations, but it’s yours. You ship. You sell. You sleep. Sort of. Then the cracks start showing. You want to customize the checkout? Sorry, you need Plus for that. You want a multilingual storefront with dynamic pricing across geographies? Maybe hire an agency. You want to build a branded mobile experience that feels native? Time to hire a dev again. It is 2023. Your boss tells you the company needs an online store and he needs it to be butterfly, fast, and performant. You’re familiar with React and you think Shopify's built-in functionalities are still pretty good, so you decide to build with Shopify Hydrogen. It’s Shopify’s answer to headless. It’s powerful. It lets your developers do things that Liquid never could. Your storefront looks stunning with buttery transitions and personalized landing pages. And still, your performance scores are through the roof. You’ve replaced four apps with custom code. But it also demands more. You’re writing GraphQL queries, managing server components, and wrestling with route loaders and caching strategies. Now your team is busy maintaining a headless stack, they barely have time to explain. What used to take hours now takes days. What used to take days now takes a roadmap. Everything is beautiful and nothing is simple. It is 2026. Your boss tells you the company needs an online store. You open Figma. Then you open Weaverse. You type something like: “Turn this Figma design into a Weaverse page. Five products. Ships worldwide. Prioritize mobile. Feels editorial.” You watch as the layout comes to life. The hero image loads before you finish your sentence. You adjust it with a message: “Make it taller. Add motion.” You change the font. You swap the checkout flow. You personalize the homepage with a prompt. It’s Hydrogen underneath, but you don’t feel it. The complexity of headless is still there. But it’s abstracted away from you, turned into something anyone can use. The future isn’t Hydrogen or AI. It’s Hydrogen plus AI. That’s how Weaverse AI is being built. And this time, everything is possible and simple. Introducing Weaverse AI, The First AI Store Builder for Shopify Hydrogen In 2022, Shopify launched Hydrogen, a React-based framework for building highly customizable, interactive, and high-performance storefronts for Shopify stores. Weaverse was created 6 months later. For years, we’ve been focused on one thing: helping Shopify merchants build better storefronts, faster. Before Hydrogen, that meant delivering Liquid-based themes that looked great out of the box and were easy to use. But Liquid has limits. Custom layout logic often requires installing third-party apps. Dynamic sections depend on metafield hacks. Over time, these workarounds pile up, slowing down performance and restricting flexibility. When Hydrogen became available, we saw a better path forward. Weaverse Hydrogen is our response: a platform that brings Hydrogen’s flexibility into a merchant-friendly environment. With Weaverse Hydrogen, developers can build Hydrogen themes and components via the SDK, make them configurable in the visual editor, and let content teams reuse and remix them across storefronts. Merchants can drag and drop prebuilt components into a Hydrogen-powered store, preview changes in real time, and deploy to Oxygen or locally with ease. It felt like Shopify Theme Editor, but as powerful as Hydrogen can be. Now we’re taking the next step with Weaverse AI. What Is Weaverse AI and What Can It Do? Weaverse AI helps developers, agencies, and merchants build Shopify Hydrogen stores faster using a natural language interface. Imagine describing the section you want—“three columns with product cards and buy buttons”—and it generates it. Upload a Figma file, and it scaffolds a matching theme. You start with a prompt and end with a shoppable page. This is where Weaverse AI leads. There are two major pieces behind this shift: 1/ Weaverse AI Assistant (inside Weaverse theme customizer): Merchants and marketers can build and update Hydrogen pages using natural language. Want a new banner? Change layout? Update styling? Just ask. Generated sections can be promoted to the component library and reused across the organization. 2/ Weaverse MCP (Model-Component-Pipeline): Developers can go from Figma to Hydrogen in one conversation. Unlike black-box generators, the output is developer-friendly, inspectable, and structured around Hydrogen code. Every section is visible to merchants, editable in the GUI, and tweakable by devs. AI defines schema, default values, and preview logic for seamless editing. For Developers: Build Less, Deliver More Faster Prototyping and Development: Weaverse AI speeds up development. Instead of building boilerplate sections from scratch, developers can scaffold pages from Figma designs and let AI handle the repetitive work. You focus on what matters: performance, business logic, and standout features. In practice, a developer could sketch out a site structure in Weaverse’s visual builder and let AI fill in the gaps, achieving in a day what might have taken a week. Less Maintenance Works: AI assistants can handle routine updates or bulk changes across a site. For example, if a client wants to change all CTA buttons to a different style, an AI could execute that change across the codebase. It’s easier to keep the storefront fresh and updated without a continuous manual slog. For Agencies: Faster Builds, Better Margin Higher Throughput, Shorter Timelines: With AI generating first drafts and a visual tool (Weaverse Theme Customizer) enabling rapid tweaks, projects that took months can now ship in weeks, without cutting corners. This means agencies can handle more clients in parallel or offer faster turnarounds, increasing their capacity and revenue potential. Custom for Everyone: Because baseline development is faster, agencies can spend more time on strategy, branding, and customization for each client. It becomes feasible to offer truly bespoke designs to even smaller clients, since the heavy lifting (coding the theme) is largely automated. Even small clients can afford something custom. AI removes the overhead, so you can offer premium service without premium dev hours. Productized Packages: Offer AI-assisted setup packages, budget Hydrogen builds, or retainers focused on optimization instead of maintenance. You move from vendor to strategic partner. For Merchants: More Control, Less Waiting No-code Visual Editing: Merchants can finally have the best of both worlds: the flexibility and speed of a custom headless site, and the ease-of-use of a Shopify page builder. You can launch landing pages, rearrange product sections, or update content without waiting on a dev. The builder is visual and intuitive, and the AI assistant can guide or even generate entire sections for you Faster Iteration. A/B test homepages. Add new sections for a campaign. Update product grids before lunch. With Hydrogen’s speed and AI’s flexibility, iteration is instant. You just chat. Lower Overhead. Reduce dependency on developers for day-to-day changes. Let AI help with SEO, performance suggestions, or layout fixes. You run a modern, high-converting store without needing a tech team on call.
Weaverse Pricing Update - More Free Usage, More Flexibility
Building a brand is tough. You’re constantly juggling priorities, from sales and marketing to product development—and everything costs money. When you’re starting, every penny matters. Your burn rate matters. As a startup ourselves, we understand this deeply. Weaverse is designed to help you build headless storefronts faster, bringing your vision to life. But we also know that’s only part of the equation. You need time and resources to truly scale and grow. This is why we released a new pricing update to offer our users more flexibility to grow, to scale, to win - without losing sleep over your burn rate. Here’s what’s new New Pay-As-You-Go Plan: Replacing our Free Plan, this option is ideal for those just starting out. You now get 10,000 free view credits (twice the previous 5,000!). Only pay as your store grows—simple, flexible, and effective. Introducing Grow Plan: Tailored for growing businesses. For $29/month, you get 200,000 view credits, along with a Service Level Agreement (SLA) and guaranteed response time to ensure your store runs smoothly even as you scale. Introducing Scale Plan: Designed for high-traffic stores. At $199/month, you’ll get 1.5 million view credits and priority access to our upcoming features, including Localization, A/B Testing, and Scheduling. What About Current Paid Users? Don’t worry, you’re covered. The new pricing doesn’t affect existing paid users. If you’re already on a legacy business plan, you can switch to any of the new plans with the same add-on pricing: $1 for every 10,000 views. Not Sure What View Credits Are? View credits are counted each time a page on your Hydrogen theme is viewed, whether it’s a first-time visit or a repeat view. This ensures that our pricing is directly linked to how much value you’re getting from Weaverse. For more details, check out our pricing page here. If you have any questions or concerns, just drop me a message on Linkedin!
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