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Clownmind
Composable & headless

Hydrogen front ends on Shopify's checkout

Keep Shopify's checkout, payments and admin. Replace everything a customer sees with a front end you control completely.

  • Hydrogen
  • Remix
  • Storefront API
  • Metaobjects
Start a conversationWhat we do

Headless Shopify Development

Headless Shopify is the right call when a brand's storytelling has outgrown Liquid, but the finance and ops teams have no appetite to leave Shopify's checkout. That split is exactly what Hydrogen was designed for.

We build the storefront in Hydrogen or Next.js, keep merchandising in Shopify metaobjects so the marketing team stays self-serve, and hand back checkout to Shopify at the last click.

0.9s

Median LCP on Hydrogen builds

100%

Checkout still owned by Shopify

12

Locales served from one codebase

Discuss this workHow we run projects

Ask about this specifically

Tell us what exists today. You will get a straight answer about approach and rough cost — from an engineer, not an account manager.

No sales sequence. One reply from a senior engineer, usually within a working day.

Capabilities

What is actually included

Scope is agreed line by line in the framing week. This is the menu it gets drawn from.

  • Hydrogen and Oxygen storefronts
  • Storefront API and Customer Account API work
  • Metaobject-driven merchandising
  • Cart and checkout handoff
  • Markets, currencies and localisation
  • Content platform integration
  • Core Web Vitals engineering
  • Editorial preview workflows

Typical stack

HydrogenRemixStorefront APIMetaobjectsOxygenSanity
How we work

Four steps, and you can stop after any of them

Every stage produces something you own outright. Nothing is held hostage to the next invoice.

  1. 01

    Framing week

    A paid week where we map the constraints, the existing systems and what success has to look like in numbers. You keep the output whether or not we continue.

  2. 02

    Architecture & plan

    A written technical plan with the trade-offs made explicit, a milestone schedule, and a fixed budget band for the first release.

  3. 03

    Build in the open

    Two-week increments, a preview URL from day three, and a Slack channel where your team can see the work rather than wait for a demo.

  4. 04

    Launch & operate

    Load testing, runbooks and monitoring before go-live, then a support window while your team takes the wheel — or a retainer if you would rather we kept it.

Composable & headless

Usually paired with

Projects rarely stay inside one service line. These are the ones that most often come along with it.

Headless & Composable Commerce

A staged path from monolith to composable: front end first, then search, then content, then checkout — each step shippable on its own.

Read more

Headless BigCommerce Development

Catalyst or a bespoke Next.js front end sitting on BigCommerce's GraphQL Storefront API, with embedded checkout kept intact.

Read more
Testimonials

What clients say when we are not in the room

These are lightly edited excerpts from reference calls, published with permission.

“They rebuilt our checkout in nine weeks and then spent another two arguing us out of three features we did not need. Conversion went up either way. That mix of speed and pushback is rare.”
PRPriya RamanathanVP Digital · Halberd Outdoor
“The framing week was worth the whole fee on its own. We came in wanting a replatform and left with a plan to fix search instead, which turned out to be the actual problem.”
TFTomás FerreiraHead of Product · Meridiana Living
“We had two agencies before this. Clownmind is the first one whose handover documentation our own engineers could read on a Friday and deploy from on a Monday.”
DWDana WhitcombeCTO · Northlake Health
“Their SEO people write code. I did not realise how much time we had wasted on audits nobody could implement until findings started shipping in the same sprint.”
KAKenji AoyamaGrowth Director · Studio Ferrous
“Peak week went by without a single incident. They rehearsed the load twice in September and found a caching bug that would have cost us the whole of Black Friday.”
ANAyesha NkemdirimDirector of Ecommerce · Verdant Supply Co.
“They told us not to build the AI feature we asked for and explained why in writing. Six months later that was clearly the right call. I trust the next recommendation more because of it.”
MBMarcus BellFounder · Rowan & Fen
FAQ

Headless Shopify Development: the questions we get asked

If yours is not covered, ask it directly — the reply comes from whoever would lead the work.

With a paid framing week. Two of our people read the existing code, talk to whoever operates the system daily, and produce a written technical plan covering approach, trade-offs, milestones and a budget band. You keep that plan regardless of what happens next.

The people you meet in the framing week. Clownmind runs senior-only delivery teams of three to five, and we do not hand projects to a second bench after the pitch. Hydrogen, Remix, Storefront API and the rest of the stack listed above are things our team uses daily, not things we subcontract.

Most first releases land between eight and sixteen weeks depending on integration surface. We ship in two-week increments with a preview environment from day three, so there is something real to look at long before launch.

Load testing, runbooks and monitoring go in before go-live. After that you either take it in-house with a documented handover — which is what we design for — or keep us on a retainer for operations and continued delivery.

Yes, from the first commit. Work happens in your repository, under your organisation, on your cloud accounts. There is no proprietary Clownmind framework you have to keep paying to license.

Ready to talk about Headless Shopify Development?

Thirty minutes, no deck, and a straight answer about whether we are the right studio for it.

Book the call
098916 18148WhatsApp