Brickspace Lab Launches Catalog, a Library of the Best Shopify Storefronts. Here’s the Merchandising Lesson Inside It
Brickspace Lab, the Shopify studio behind themes like Paper and Keystone, has launched Catalog, a growing library of more than 400 ecommerce storefront designs. (It’s a design-inspiration gallery from the studio, not Shopify’s developer Catalog API — easy to mix up.) A wall of good-looking stores is fun to scroll, but it’s also useful: spend a few minutes in there and you start to see what the stores that actually convert do differently.
What happened
Brickspace Lab is an independent studio that says it has driven more than $100M in merchant GMV across 1,000-plus brands, with a 97% positive rating on the Shopify theme store. Catalog pulls 400+ storefront designs into one place for anyone planning or rebuilding a store.
Scroll enough of them and a pattern shows up: the best stores treat the collection page as something they merchandise, not a bucket they dump products into. The order is deliberate, and the top row is doing real work.
Why it matters
Design inspiration usually gets filed under “branding,” but a lot of the decisions that move money on a Shopify store are merchandising decisions, and most of them happen on the collection page. That’s where a shopper decides, in a second or two, whether your store is worth more of their time. The layout matters, the images matter, and so does the order the products show up in.
A nice theme won’t save a collection page that leads with the wrong products. And the easiest way to lead with the wrong products is to let sold-out ones sit at the top.
What this means for Shopify merchants
If you’re mining a gallery like Catalog, copy the discipline behind the good stores, not just how they look. The part that carries over to any theme: keep what people can actually buy where their attention lands.
Out-of-stock products quietly break that rule. Your default sort doesn’t know or care that something sold out, so a product that used to sell well can hold a top spot long after you’ve run out. Everyone who hits that page burns their first glance on something they can’t have, while the in-stock items that would’ve converted get shoved down.
You don’t need a redesign for this. You just need the sold-out items to get out of the way on their own. That’s the whole job Pushy does: it pushes out-of-stock products to the bottom of your collection pages and brings them back up when they restock, so the store you spent time designing always opens on something a customer can buy.
The bottom line
Catalog is worth a browse, but use it on your own store too. Start at the top of the grid and ask what a first-time visitor sees. If the answer is a sold-out product, the prettiest theme in the gallery won’t save the sale.
