Rebuilding LooseHeadz’s Shopify Store in Under a Month

Moving rugby’s mental-health charity off an expiring page builder onto a clean, mobile-first Shopify theme, and why that counts as tech for good.

Published on March 25, 2025

A message on LinkedIn, a Shopify store with an app-builder subscription about to expire, and a deadline measured in weeks. That’s how the LooseHeadz project started, and it’s the kind of brief we like.

LooseHeadz homepage hero on the rebuilt Shopify store, featuring rugby players promoting mental health awareness

Who LooseHeadz are

If you follow rugby you’ve probably seen the H logo on a beanie or a training top: two goalposts, which is also an H. LooseHeadz started in 2017 at the bar of Wilmslow RUFC in Cheshire, and the mission is as clear as any I’ve worked with: put a mental health lead into every rugby club in the world, give them a toolkit to support players, coaches and fans, and #TackleTheStigma. There are now well over a thousand clubs signed up across dozens of countries, and the merch (tees, hoodies, headwear) is how the LooseHeadz Foundation funds the work.

Which means the Shopify store isn’t a side project. It is the fundraising engine.

The problem

The old site had grown up around a third-party page-builder app. That’s a common Shopify story: it gets you a nice-looking homepage quickly, then a year later you’re paying a monthly fee for something nobody on the team knows how to edit, the pages are heavy on mobile, and the design has drifted away from where the brand has got to. With the app subscription due to expire, LooseHeadz needed a full redesign, fast, that they could maintain themselves afterwards without the recurring cost.

What we did

We rebuilt the store on a clean, mobile-first Shopify theme and moved every page off the page builder and into native sections the team can edit in the theme customiser. The whole thing was delivered in under a month.

LooseHeadz Shopify collection page showing branded rugby t-shirts with the #TackleTheStigma message

A few of the decisions that mattered:

Mission first, shop second, but never far apart. The homepage leads with the “why”, the ambassadors and the clubs, and every one of those sections has a route into the collections. People buy LooseHeadz kit because of what it funds, so the story and the shop have to sit together.
Native sections over apps. Featured-in-press, ambassador grids and the community collage are all built with standard Shopify sections and metafields, so there is nothing to renew and nothing that breaks when an app changes its pricing.
Speed on mobile. Most of the traffic is people on their phones after training. Fewer scripts, properly sized images, and a theme that doesn’t fight the platform.
Email capture that earns its place. A simple first-order offer that funds the Foundation rather than a pop-up for the sake of it.

Grid of LooseHeadz ambassadors including rugby players wearing branded apparel on the Shopify charity store

Why this counts as Tech for Good

Most of the tech for good work we’ve done (FixIT with Barnardo’s, the work with AWARE, Moira Community) has been building a product from scratch for a charity. LooseHeadz was different: it was a commercial Shopify job, done at commercial speed, for an organisation whose entire revenue goes into mental health support in rugby clubs. Faster site, fewer costs, easier to run. Every one of those is money and time that goes to the mission instead. That’s tech for good too, and honestly it’s the version most charities need more often.

You can see the store at shop.looseheadz.co.uk, and the full write-up is in our LooseHeadz case study. If you run a charity or purpose-led brand on Shopify and you’re paying for apps you don’t need, we should talk.