iD Uniforms: school uniform, moved to Shopify and sorted.
- Client
- iD Uniforms: schoolwear, workwear and teamwear
- Platform
- Shopify, moved from WooCommerce
- What we did
- Custom theme, data migration, VAT rules, personalisation, redirects
- schools and businesses supplied
- 250+
- school collections created automatically
- 90+
- product redirects to protect search rankings
- 821
The brief
A store that had outgrown WooCommerce.
iD Uniforms supplies schoolwear, workwear and teamwear to more than 250 schools and businesses across the UK. Their WooCommerce store couldn't keep up: it was slow, its checkout couldn't handle the personalisation an embroidery business depends on, and managing hundreds of school collections had become unmanageable.
They asked us to move everything to Shopify: a new custom theme, the full catalogue, the UK VAT rules for children's clothing, and a checkout built around how they actually work, with embroidered initials, logo uploads and phone numbers collected before checkout.
Custom theme
Built from scratch, run without a developer.
We built a custom Shopify theme in Liquid, designed for the phone first. Parents start with a search for their school, then browse by category, with the logos of trusted schools and businesses on show.
Everything day to day is managed in Shopify's theme editor: school collections, homepage content, a back-to-school popup with its own deadline and link, and every personalisation option. The team runs the store without touching code.
Personalisation
Embroidery, logos and name tags from one product page.
The options on each product page come from its tags, so the team decides what can be personalised just by tagging a product. Embroidery costs go into the basket as their own line, linked to the garment they belong to.
- Embroidered initials on the left or right breast
- Back names and arm prints
- Logo upload through a hosted personaliser app
- Hat style choice on bundle products
- Required name entry for iron-on name tag orders
UK VAT
Zero-rated where HMRC says, and nowhere else.
Children's schoolwear is zero-rated for VAT, but that doesn't cover a whole catalogue. Adult sizes, clubs and workwear are standard-rated, so a single store-wide setting would be wrong.
- By collection – zero-rating applied to school collections, matched by exact title so clubs and workwear bundles aren't caught by mistake.
- By garment – rules for each garment type, set up with scripts rather than by hand.
- By size – for example, blazers up to a 36" chest and trousers up to a 34" waist are zero-rated; adult sizes are not.
Basket and checkout
A phone number on every order.
Shopify's own checkout doesn't ask for a phone number on click-and-collect orders, and iD Uniforms needs one to confirm embroidery details. We added a required phone field to the basket. It's saved with the order and shown in Shopify's admin on every order.
Migration
Everything moved across, nothing lost in search.
The catalogue
The full product catalogue moved from WooCommerce with scripts, including images, prices, variants and tags. Variants that came across wrongly were fixed with scripts too.
School collections
All 90+ school collections were created, and products assigned to them, automatically rather than by hand.
Search rankings
821 product redirects, plus redirects for every collection, map each old WooCommerce address to its new Shopify page, so existing Google rankings carried over.
The outcome
A store the team runs themselves.
iD Uniforms now has a Shopify store carrying their whole catalogue, with search rankings protected by a complete redirect map, VAT applied correctly across every school collection, and embroidery, logos and name tags all ordered from a single product page.
The team runs it day to day from Shopify's editor and product tags, without needing us to change code.