Stolen Goat, A Ground-Up WordPress Rebuild

The Brief

Stolen Goat is a UK cycling and running apparel brand with a loud, characterful identity, and a busy WooCommerce store that had served them well for years. As any long-running site does, it had grown more complex over time under the weight of everything added along the way, and the brand had moved on creatively. They wanted a fresh start: a storefront that matched where the brand is now and a clean foundation to build on for the next few years.

The goal was a ground-up rebuild: a homepage that truly captures the brand's personality, a theme built and owned in-house so it's quick to maintain and extend, and bespoke functionality for the things the brand does that a standard WooCommerce setup doesn't handle well.

Design Iterations

The most important part of this project happened before a line of theme code was written. We went through several rounds of design exploration to find a visual language that felt unmistakably like the brand rather than another tidy-but-forgettable commerce template.

Early directions were more conventional, clean product grids, big hero banners, the usual commerce furniture. They worked, but they were quiet. The brand isn't quiet. So we kept pushing, iterating towards something more editorial: a layout that treats the homepage like the opening spread of a magazine.

The direction we landed on, internally nicknamed "System F", is built around an arch-tile grid: a mosaic of photography and oversized type, framed like polaroids and pinned to the page, that spells out the brand's personality the moment you arrive. A warm cream-and-ink palette with a single bold pink accent ties it together, paired with a confident display typeface for headlines. The result reads as a deliberate piece of design, not a theme someone bought.

Crucially, System F became a reusable design system rather than a one-off page. The same palette, type scale and components carry through product pages, collection archives, the blog and the brand's wider materials, so everything feels like it belongs to the same family.

A Custom Theme, Built From Scratch

Rather than layer the new design onto the existing setup, we built a fresh WordPress theme from the ground up. That meant clean, predictable templates, markup we understood completely, and styling driven by the design system rather than layers of inherited overrides. Performance improved as a direct result, with far less code to maintain, and ongoing changes became quick and low-risk.

Bespoke WordPress Plugins

A modern apparel store needs more than a pretty front end. The brand's day-to-day operation depends on a few things standard WooCommerce handles poorly, so we built them as custom plugins, kept separate from the theme so the two can evolve independently.

• Instant search. WooCommerce's built-in search is slow and literal. We built a dedicated search layer with its own product index that updates automatically whenever stock or products change, powering an as-you-type results widget with typo tolerance and curated synonyms (so a search for "bib" finds the right shorts even if the product title phrases it differently).
• Size-guide system. Cycling kit lives or dies on fit, and returns are expensive. We built a plugin that generates accurate, per-product sizing guidance from the brand's own measurement data, presented consistently on every product page instead of buried in a generic PDF.
• Made-to-order webshops. The brand runs custom team-kit projects, short-lived stores for a club or event with their own products and sizing. We built tooling to spin these up cleanly inside the same WordPress install without cluttering the main catalogue.
• Catalogue controls. A set of smaller refinements that keep the right products visible in the right places across the shop and category pages, so the storefront always shows what it should.

The Outcome

The brand now runs on a store that looks like them, loads faster, and sits on a platform they own outright. The distinctive homepage gives the site a personality that matches the products, and the bespoke plugins handle the brand-specific work, search, sizing, and custom kit, that off-the-shelf WooCommerce never did well. Just as importantly, because the theme and plugins were built deliberately and kept separate, the whole thing is genuinely maintainable: new ideas can ship quickly instead of being wrestled into an ageing template.