ISMYLOVA is a Miami Beach luxury boutique and online store founded by Bela Ismylova, a former human rights lawyer who spent two decades in advocacy before moving into fashion. The brand sits at the intersection of fashion, art, and social mission, curating designer pieces from around the world with a portion of profits supporting refugee women. It runs both a physical showroom on Alton Road and a worldwide-shipping online store.
ISMYLOVA came to SPLIT Development — a boutique Shopify agency for luxury fashion, beauty, and multi-brand retail brands, based in Tallinn, Estonia and Sacramento, CA — for a full redesign and custom Shopify build. The core tension was clear from the start. ISMYLOVA carries the catalog depth of a large multi-brand retailer, dozens of designers, thousands of SKUs, deep category trees, but it needs to feel like an intimate boutique, not an aggregator. The whole project was built around resolving that tension.
Most stores this size lean into their scale. Dense mega-menus, long dropdown lists, loud sale colors, everything visible at once. That approach kills the premium feel a luxury brand depends on. Our job was to give ISMYLOVA the browsing depth of a serious multi-brand retailer while keeping the restraint and calm of a high-end boutique.
We designed the store from scratch, with a CRO-oriented approach to layout and product presentation rather than decoration for its own sake. Several deliberate decisions carried the luxury positioning:
A flat, quiet header instead of a heavy mega-menu. A single horizontal row, no pushy dropdown panels, a thin header that sits lightly over the content. This alone shifts the feel from marketplace to boutique.
Collections treated as a destination, not a dropdown. Instead of burying navigation inside a mega-menu, category content lives on its own storefront-style page: category tabs paired with large photo-led promo cards rather than text lists.
Brands shown as a gallery, not a list. Each designer is a card, logo over imagery, so the brand roster reads as a curated showcase. In parallel, each brand doubles as a filter on the product listing pages.
Depth hidden inside the filter. Rather than exposing 40+ options at once, filtering lives in a drawer with collapsible accordions, Price, Type, Color, Size, Designers. The shopper sees five groups and decides how deep to go. This is a direct application of Hick’s Law: fewer visible choices, faster decisions, less overwhelm.
Color discipline. Pink is the brand’s accent, used in a few specific places, never as a pressure tool. Everything else stays black, white, and grey. Uncontrolled loud colors on discounts are exactly what makes a catalog feel mass-market. We kept the accent tightly contained.
The build was done on Shopify with the Dawn theme as a foundation, heavily restyled and extended rather than used out of the box.
Custom product card style and page layouts. The product cards and the overall page templates were designed and built by us, structured around conversion, not just aesthetics.
Adapted mega-menu logic. Dawn ships with mega-menu capability, but the categorization, blending product categories and designer brands in one coherent system, was reworked and restyled to fit the boutique navigation model.
Custom cart drawer. A bespoke slide-out cart, built to keep shoppers in flow rather than sending them to a separate page.
Product page features. Size guide in a popup, full image gallery, wishlist, and an As Seen On section showing pieces worn on real people, bringing the styling and editorial side of the brand onto the product page.
Mobile-first throughout. The entire design was built mobile-first, so the mobile experience isn’t a stripped-down afterthought, it carries the same structure and quality as desktop.
International commerce with Shopify Markets. We configured Shopify Markets end to end: shipping, pricing, taxes, and translations, so a boutique in Miami can sell cleanly to customers worldwide.
Performance-conscious build. All imagery runs on lazy loading to keep the storefront light despite a large, image-heavy catalog.
Integrations. Klaviyo for email and newsletter capture, and GA4 for analytics, integrated into the design rather than bolted on.
Tech stack: Shopify with a customized Dawn theme, Shopify Markets for international selling, Klaviyo for email and newsletter, and GA4 for analytics.
The outcome is a store that carries a large multi-brand catalog without ever feeling like one. ISMYLOVA got a storefront that matches the brand it represents: restrained, editorial, and premium on both desktop and mobile, with the operational depth, international selling, deep filtering, self-manageable content sections, to run as a real commercial business behind the boutique surface.
The performance-conscious build holds up under a large, image-heavy catalog: on real-world Chrome user data, the store passes Google’s Core Web Vitals assessment on mobile, with a Largest Contentful Paint of 1.8 seconds, a First Contentful Paint of 1.4 seconds, and a Cumulative Layout Shift of 0. For a luxury store of this catalog size, that combination of premium presentation with fast, stable delivery is exactly what a serious multi-brand fashion brand needs.
See more of SPLIT Development’s luxury fashion and multi-brand retail Shopify work at splitdev.com/portfolio/shopify/
Shopify Development
Store Redesign
Custom Theme
Shopify Markets
Fashion & Retail
Luxury E-commerce
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