Hero Sportz

Hero Sportz did not exist as a storefront when Steven hired me. He had the brand — logo, color system, the "WHY NOT YOU" tagline that runs through everything. He had product photography. What he wanted, first, was football glove design.

He builds product the way an NFL linebacker would — concepts on top of concepts, mockups before manufacturing, ideas tested visually before they're tested in production. The first ask was a set of glove colorway concepts: pieces he could use for inspiration, for pitching, for sketching out where the brand could go in performance gear.

The website came next. Same brief in shape, different surface: build something that looks like Hero Sportz, not like every other athletic apparel store on Shopify. Custom theme. From scratch. Solo build. Standard Shopify, not Plus.

Two deliverables, one consistent rule: don't reach for the obvious sportswear shorthand. Athletic apparel design has a default — chrome accents, italics, gradient meshes, "explosive" graphic language pulled out of the same Pinterest mood board everyone else used. The ask on both sides of this engagement was to skip that lane.

For the gloves, that meant treating the colorways as a system, not as unrelated drops. For the storefront, it meant custom Liquid instead of a theme-store reskin so the storefront could be structured around what makes Hero Sportz specific — athlete-named collections, the catalog, the loyalty club — rather than around what every Shopify athletic store inherits by default.

One thing I'll say plainly: Steven played for the Baltimore Ravens, my favorite team in football. That didn't change the price or the scope. It did change how many evenings I spent on this.

Renders, not production

These were concept renders — design exploration intended for inspiration, pitching, and roadmap thinking. Steven prototypes a lot of product. None of these colorways went to production; the renders earned their keep as visual proofs of where the brand could go in performance gear, not as specs for a manufacturing run.

That distinction matters in a portfolio context. I'm not claiming these are gloves you can buy. I'm claiming I designed concept artwork for them at a quality the brand could pitch from, and that the design system holds up across the set.

A colorway system

The set runs as a system. Cyan-on-black is the loudest. Black-on-cyan is the cleanest. Yellow-and-white referee-stripe is the most editorial. White-with-orange-on-confetti is the most lifestyle-coded. Green-and-orange is the alternate-uniform register. Same hardware across all of them, different brand registers across the surface.

Cyan-on-black / loudest register

Black-on-cyan / cleanest register

Yellow-and-white stripe / editorial register

Yellow-and-white stripe / palm view

Green-and-orange / alternate-uniform register

Green-and-orange / palm view

The wristband tab carries the same architecture across every colorway — black hardware, "HERO / WHY NOT YOU" lockup in white. The system stays consistent so the colorways read as one drop, not orphans.

Why the H completes when both hands come together

The most considered move in the set isn't visible in any single glove photographed alone. The Hero Sportz "H" mark splits across the back of both gloves. Half on the left hand, half on the right. When the player puts both hands together — pre-snap, gloves up after a play, hands raised in the locker room — the H closes.

That's product design thinking, not graphic design thinking. The decoration isn't decoration; it's a thing the player does with their body that reveals the brand. It also gives Steven something to point to when he pitches the gear: this glove was designed by someone who watched football, not someone who made it look fast.

After the gloves, the website. Steven had everything I'd worked from on the gloves — color, voice, mark — already locked. He brought the photography. I owned typography, theme architecture, and the entire Liquid build.

Typography that carries the weight

The headline stack had to read like sportswear — confident, athletic, modern — without leaning on the obvious cues that every athletic brand reaches for first. The system runs heavy on the hero and product detail pages, lighter through editorial copy, with strict scale discipline so the cart, loyalty club, and sponsorship CTA all read on the same hierarchy.

Athlete-first information architecture

Hero Sportz's catalog is organized around the athletes Steven signs. Each athlete gets a collection. Products live in multiple collections: athlete, product type, and sub-line. Get it wrong and you end up with duplicated SKUs and broken navigation. Get it right and adding a new athlete is a tagging operation, not a rebuild.

Restraint where a stock theme would shout

Stock themes default to noise — sticky bars, exit pop-ups, carousels, badges on everything. The Hero Sportz theme strips all of that to the floor. One CTA per screen on the marketing pages. PDPs that lead with product, price, size selector, and add-to-cart, in that order.

Custom Liquid, no page builder, no theme app

The whole storefront is hand-rolled Liquid. No drag-and-drop section app, no Online Store 2.0 theme reskinned with a child theme. The benefits are control and performance: section schemas are written for the actual content patterns Hero Sportz needs, not the lowest common denominator.

Standard Shopify, not Plus

Hero Sportz runs on Shopify's standard tier, not Plus. That shaped the build. Everything in the theme is built within the standard apparatus, which keeps Steven's monthly costs honest and means nothing on the storefront depends on a tier upgrade to keep working.

Built for someone else to run

Steven owns the catalog day-to-day. The theme exposes editable content through Shopify's section settings wherever he'd reasonably want to change something, and locks down the structural Liquid he shouldn't touch.

The site is live and active. The catalog has grown to include named athlete collections (Chris Brazzell, Xavier Restrepo) and other ongoing programs. Steven runs it.

The gloves stay in the design library — concept work that gives Hero Sportz a visual answer to "where could the brand go next in performance gear?" None of the colorways went to production. The fact that the brand has a coherent visual answer ready when the question comes up is the deliverable.

I don't have analytics in front of me to put numbers in this section, and I'd rather leave that gap honest than fill it with something I can't back. What I can say is the theme has held up. The brand has grown into the architecture, not out of it. That's the test for a custom build, and this one's passed.

If I were starting another sprint on Hero Sportz tomorrow, I'd push the athlete pages further. Each athlete is a collection with a banner and a product list right now — solid, but the brand's whole story lives in the relationships with those athletes, and the site doesn't tell that story yet.

Bespoke athlete landing pages, with bio, signature pieces, and a content layer for press and footage, would unlock real editorial weight. And if the gloves ever go to production, those pages should anchor a flagship Performance section the brand doesn't have yet.