All WorkCase Study · Embedded Engagement
Type
Embedded lead — ongoing
Reports to
VP of Marketing
Scope
Storefront · Apps · QA · Marketing ops
Client
Under NDA
Services
Theme ArchitectureCustom AppsE2E & ComplianceLifecycle & Reporting
Stack
Liquid / OS 2.0 · Tailwind · Playwright + BrowserStack · Nitro + TanStack + Drizzle · Remix + Prisma · Klaviyo · BigQuery + Next.js
The Engagement
Small marketing teams, a shared promotional calendar, and no in-house Shopify engineering.
A 12-brand consumer holdings company runs each of its brands lean. For one of its DTC properties — a senior-care smart-monitoring brand selling to older adults and the adult children managing their safety remotely — I came in as the embedded Shopify lead, working directly with the VP of Marketing.
Embedded means something specific here. The VP owns the promotional calendar, the campaign priorities, and the final call on what ships. I own scoping each piece of work, executing it independently, and showing up with something reviewable. A promotion lands on the calendar, I scope the storefront and email work it implies, build against a preview theme, and the VP approves before anything goes live. There is no daily standup and no ticket queue — what replaces them is a defined scope per workstream and the discipline to surface tradeoffs in writing before they become surprises.
4
Workstreams in one role — own, guard, extend, operate
2
Storefronts, second brand onboarded by config alone
3
Custom apps, each built only where the ecosystem stopped
12
Brands in the portfolio the tooling was built to serve
The Approach
Four workstreams that compound, because the same person owns all of them.
01
Own the storefront
Online Store 2.0 section composition, token-driven styling, and a merchant-editable schema surface — so the marketing team can run the promotional calendar without a developer in the loop for every change.
02
Guard it automatically
Nobody is manually regression-testing after every marketing edit. Static analysis traces Liquid values through assigns and filter chains to catch anything landing unescaped in a script block, and a Playwright + BrowserStack suite covers add-to-cart, checkout, subscription toggles and navigation with WCAG 2.1 AA scans, visual regression, and Core Web Vitals budgets.
03
Extend only where the ecosystem stops
Evaluate what Shopify already offers, integrate the strongest option, build custom only past the wall. All three custom builds started as an integration that hit one: a SAML-SSO affiliate dashboard over the GoAffPro API, a returns app whose structured exit survey turns returns into a product signal, and subscriptions on selling plans.
04
Operate what was built
Klaviyo flows and segmentation, affiliate program operations, and BigQuery-backed dashboards where the VP of Marketing watches whether any of it moved a number. The person who built the storefront maintains the reporting on it.
Across The Portfolio
Ongoing — second brand live
The tooling was built store-agnostic, so the second brand arrived at the price of a config file.
The engagement’s second storefront is a sister brand in the same portfolio — its own theme serving its own identity, on the same architecture. The E2E suite treats every store as a config file of URLs, selectors and budgets, so the second brand picked up critical-path, accessibility, visual-regression and performance coverage with no new test code written. The compliance tooling runs against any Liquid theme the same way.
One brand paid the cost of building the guardrails; every subsequent brand in the portfolio inherits them at the price of a configuration file.
