Case study 02 — Shopify ecommerce
GEWO USA
The US store of a table tennis equipment manufacturer, carrying two jobs at once: be the brand, and be the shop. It loads its largest element in 1.2 seconds and moves nothing while it does. The store is live, so judge it there.
The work is live — judge it there
The brief in one line
Make the brand and the catalogue stop fighting each other.
The catalogue runs from shakehand and penhold blades through four categories of rubber, indoor and outdoor tables, balls, apparel, footwear, and maintenance items down to edge tape and glue.
Those are not one kind of purchase. Apparel is browsed. Rubber is specified. A table is researched. Edge tape is re-ordered. The store has to let all four happen without the brand story blocking someone who came to buy glue.
01
Information architecture
The menu is theshop assistant.
Six headings, twenty-seven subcategories, organised by how table tennis equipment is actually classified rather than how a generic store template wants to group it.
Rackets3 sub
- Paddles Shakehand
- Blades Shakehand, Chinese penhold
- Combo specials
Rubber4 sub
- Inverted
- Short pips
- Long pips
- Anti-spin
Tables5 sub
- Indoor
- Outdoor
- Nets & net sets
- Cleaner
- Accessories
Ball5 sub
- Tournament
- Training
- Cases
- Collectors
- Collector nets
Accessories6 sub
- Clothing
- Bags
- Shoes
- Racket care
- Rubber accessories
- Novelty
Deals4 sub
- Bundles
- New arrivals
- On sale
- Clearance
02
Catalogue depth
What is actuallybehind each tile.
Product counts as shown on the homepage collection tiles. Publishing them tells a customer whether a category is worth opening.
Blades and rubber carry the range; shoes and novelty items do not. A store that hides those numbers sends a customer into an empty room and loses them there.
03
Performance
It is fast, andnothing jumps.
Core Web Vitals as Shopify recorded them over thirty days. These are the three measurements Google uses to judge whether a page is usable.
1.2s
Largest Contentful Paint. Google calls anything under 2.5s good, so this is less than half the limit
56ms
Interaction to Next Paint. The threshold is 200ms. This is roughly a quarter of it
0
Cumulative Layout Shift. Nothing on the page moves while it loads. Not low, zero
Why a store owner should care about the third one.
Layout shift is what happens when a page loads in pieces and the thing you were about to tap slides out from under your thumb. On a phone it is the reason people tap the wrong button and leave.
A score of zero means it never happens here. That is not a design flourish, it is a checkout that does not lose people for a stupid reason.
Design decisions
Four choices and the reasoning behind them
01A manufacturer’s store has two jobs at once
GEWO USA was established by Ben Nisbet with professional player Mishel Levinski, on the principle of building equipment “with the eyes of a player”.
That changes the brief. A multi-brand retailer helps you choose between brands. A manufacturer’s store has to carry the brand itself and still work as a shop. Every layout decision is a negotiation between those two jobs.
02Navigation built on how equipment is classified
Twenty-seven subcategories under six headings, following the sport’s own taxonomy rather than a generic shop template. A player who knows they want long pips reaches them in two moves.
The menu is doing the work a shop assistant would do, and it can only do that if whoever built it understands the categories.
03Four claims a reseller cannot make
Pro tested, match-ready consistency, premium materials, precision engineered. Those are manufacturing claims, and a reseller has no standing to make them.
Sitting them under the hero, before the catalogue, frames everything below as the manufacturer’s own equipment rather than another storefront selling the same boxes.
04Combo specials, for the customer who does not know what to ask
The hardest customer in table tennis retail is the one who cannot pair a blade with a rubber. Pre-matched setups get their own navigation category, homepage section and tile, with the saving shown as a percentage.
An intimidating configuration problem becomes one product decision, without hiding the components from players who do want to choose.
What I am not claiming
The speed numbers above are real and measured. There is no conversion or revenue data I can publish for this store, so none appears here. The conversion figures on this site belong to the Table Tennis USA project and only to it.
What GEWO USA shows is a different problem solved: a brand-owned catalogue rather than a multi-brand retailer, built fast. The store is live. Judge the execution there.
Next project — 03
Paul David
Contact
Selling your own brand direct?
A manufacturer store has a different problem from a retailer. Tell me about your range and where customers get lost in it.