An online store for clothing labels

Every apparel shop lives or dies on the size grid. Variants, variant groups and per-SKU inventory mean a shirt can carry size and colour as separate choices with stock tracked per combination, and a sold-out medium reads as sold out rather than failing at the last step of checkout.

That is the unglamorous part, and it is the one that generates support email when it is wrong.

Small-run apparel does not sell from a grid of tiles. It sells from a lookbook, a story about the run, and a page that feels like the label rather than like a catalogue — which is why so many clothing brands end up paying a developer for a custom landing page every season.

The page builder is that, without the developer. Sections, order, type, colour and spacing are all editable on any theme, so a drop can have its own page built in an afternoon and the shop can look different in March than it did in November.

Scarcity is the mechanism for most independent labels, and it only works if the shop tells the truth about it. Stock counts are per SKU, so the run is real and the shop stops selling what it does not have.

The other half of a drop is the list. 2,500 contacts are on the plan, so the announcement goes to people who already bought once, at the hour you choose, rather than to whoever an algorithm decides to show it to.

• Scrawl — Marker on black. For a label that prints its own shirts.
• Franchise — White walls, black type, a category for everything. For a shop that stocks the street.

Every theme is a live shop you can scroll before choosing it, and none of them is fixed once applied — the rest of the shelf is worth a look if none of these is right for your work.

On what any of this costs, there is what an online shop actually costs, which breaks the bill into the seven places money goes. Or build one and look at it — building and publishing cost nothing.