LooseHeadz: a Shopify rebuild in under a month.
Rugby’s mental health charity funds its work through its store. We took it off an expiring page builder and onto a clean, mobile-first theme.
LooseHeadz is rugby’s mental health charity, on a mission to #TackleTheStigma. Their Shopify store isn’t a side project. The tees, hoodies and headwear are how the LooseHeadz Foundation funds its work. When the page-builder app the site was built on was due to expire, we redesigned and rebuilt the whole store on a clean, mobile-first theme in under a month.
- Client
- LooseHeadz Foundation, rugby’s mental health charity
- Based
- Wilmslow, Cheshire; clubs signed up worldwide
- Platform
- shop.looseheadz.co.uk on Shopify
- Scope
- Full redesign and rebuild; page-builder apps removed
- Timeline
- Under one month, early 2025
- How it started
- A conversation on LinkedIn
A mental health lead in every rugby club in the world.
If you follow rugby you have probably seen the H, two goalposts that are also a letter, on a beanie or a training top. LooseHeadz started in 2017 at the bar of Wilmslow RUFC in Cheshire, and the mission is as clear as any we have worked with: place a mental health lead into every rugby club around the world, and equip them with a toolkit of free, accessible resources to support players, coaches and fans.
The merchandise is how that gets paid for. Every order funds the Foundation, which means the Shopify store is not the marketing for the charity. It is the fundraising engine.
- 2017Founded at the bar of Wilmslow RUFC, inspired by that summer’s Lions tour
- 1,300+Rugby clubs signed up, across 36 countries, by LooseHeadz’s own count
- <1 moFrom kick-off to a fully rebuilt, relaunched Shopify store
- 0Page-builder subscriptions left to renew once we were done
A store built on an app that was about to expire.
The old site had grown up around third-party WYSIWYG page-builder apps. It is a common Shopify story: it gets you a good-looking homepage quickly, then a year later you are 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 those app subscriptions due to expire, LooseHeadz needed a full redesign, fast. That meant a better user experience, proper mobile responsiveness, and a simpler structure the team could maintain themselves without recurring app costs.
What we did
Every page moved off the page builder and into native Shopify sections the team can edit in the theme customiser.
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Mission first, shop never far
The homepage leads with the why, the ambassadors and the clubs. Every one of those sections has a route into the collections. People buy the kit because of what it funds.
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Native sections over apps
Featured-in-press, ambassador grids and the community collage are all standard Shopify sections and metafields. Nothing to renew, nothing that breaks when an app changes its pricing.
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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.
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Email capture that earns its place
A simple first-order offer that feeds the Foundation’s list, rather than a pop-up for the sake of it.
The store
Clean, fast and recognisably LooseHeadz, with the mental health mission front and centre on every template.
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The homepage: mission, then shop, in one screen. -
Collections carry the #TackleTheStigma promise above the products. -
Ambassadors, built as a native section the team can update. -
As featured in: BBC, The Guardian, Metro, The Telegraph. -
The community wearing it is the best proof the mission lands. -
Headwear, with the H doing the talking. -
Email capture with a reason to say yes.
Faster, cheaper to run, and theirs to manage.
By removing the legacy tools and delivering a UX-focused, fully responsive Shopify experience, LooseHeadz came away with a quicker site, a simpler back end, and no recurring page-builder bill. More importantly, they have a store that matches their purpose: easy to navigate, easy to manage, and ready to support a growing global movement.
Most of the tech for good work we have done has meant building a product from scratch for a charity. LooseHeadz was different: a commercial Shopify job, done at commercial speed, for an organisation whose revenue goes into mental health support in rugby clubs. Every pound not spent on apps and every minute not spent fighting the theme goes to the mission instead. That is tech for good too. Honestly, it is the version most charities need more often.
We wrote about the rebuild at the time in Rebuilding LooseHeadz’s Shopify store in under a month. If you run a charity or purpose-led brand on Shopify and you are paying for apps you don’t need, start with our Shopify consultancy.
The LooseHeadz story, as it happened
Written along the way, as it happened. Nothing tidied up afterwards.
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Rebuilding LooseHeadz’s Shopify Store in Under a Month
Moving rugby’s mental-health charity LooseHeadz off an expiring page builder onto a clean, mobile-first Shopify theme in under a month.