Case Study: NGMCo.

Nice Guy Machine Co. is an EDC design and manufacturing company based right here in Colorado. When I met Archie I knew almost nothing about the Everyday Carry scene but as I toured his workshop and heard his story I learned that there is a deeply devoted group of people all around the world who are obsessed with this gear!

When Archie approached me about working on this project I was glad that I had previous experience working in Shopify. The first Shopify project I worked on I struggled with some of the limitations of the Liquid templating language (no objects for example!). I was glad to see Shopify's tools for local development and deployment to production had been greatly improved in the time since previous projects.

Archie's unique business problem to solve was that many of his products sell out within seconds or minutes! What a great problem to have :) The issue in this case is that Shopify was built with a more traditional sales model in mind so products were either hidden or marked as sold out (depending on settings). This was confusing for visitors and didn't allow for a good way to show a gallery of all of the beautiful pieces that Archie crafts.

My task was to solve this problem and provide a way to differentiate between products for sale and a list of all the products that Archie makes. Using Shopify's Tags I was able to create custome Liquid templates that show gallery items based on their Tag. Gallery items don't show pricing or any of the action items and filtering options you'd see on products for sale.

One bonus feature on this project was adding a parallax effect with the NGMCo. logo. Archie wanted to streamline the way most users interact with the site instead of showing the default Shopify homepage template. The solution was a simple menu and the iconic bead logo background that reacts to mouse movement on desktop and looks great on mobile devices. I don't typically get to work with JavaScript animations on most projects so this was a fun addition!