An online store for gear and equipment brands

Somebody buying a pack, a camera or a piece of overland kit reads the whole page, compares it against two others in open tabs, and comes back three times before ordering. That is the opposite of an impulse category and it asks the opposite thing of a product page: not a photograph and a button, but capacity, weight, materials, dimensions and what it is actually for.

A product page here is built from sections rather than one description field, so specifications can be a specification block instead of a paragraph with commas in it.

Gear brands accumulate variants — sizes, capacities, finishes, model years — and a flat grid stops working somewhere around the fortieth product. The themes drawn for this trade lean on collection structure, hover menus and search rather than on scrolling, because the shop has to be navigable by somebody who already knows what they want.

Equipment brands almost all end up publishing something alongside the products — a fitting guide, a route, a maintenance walkthrough, a course. That content is usually stranded on a blog that does not link to anything.

Pages, products and courses are the same system here, so a guide can sit in the shop and sell the thing it is teaching about, and a course can be a product in the same catalogue as the kit.

• Optic — A video header, a serif statement, and products on white. For hardware made carefully.
• Outpost — Canvas, ink and rust. A split slideshow hero, contour-mapped panels and condensed capitals, for gear that has to work out there.
• Traverse — Snow, carbon and one green. Hover menus of collection tiles, a search that answers as you type, and a catalogue that never ends.

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.