The Challenge
Fika Swedish Kitchen had outgrown Squarespace. In the early weeks of COVID-19, the cafe and retail business wanted to lift its online sales and offer customers order pickup across its locations, and it needed a platform with proper ecommerce capabilities underneath.
The challenge wasn’t just technical. Fika’s brand was carefully considered: Scandinavian, warm, minimal. They needed a migration that preserved the feel of their existing site while unlocking real ecommerce power underneath.
The Approach
I treated this as a brand project first and an online shop second. Before touching Shopify, I spent time understanding what made the Squarespace site feel like Fika: the typography choices, the photography treatment, the whitespace rhythm, the way products were presented as craft rather than commodity.
The migration plan was designed to feel seamless to customers: the same visual language and the same brand feeling, with a fundamentally more capable platform underneath.
Content was audited, reorganised, and in many cases rewritten to better suit Shopify’s product-centric structure. Every page was mapped from old to new, with redirects set up to protect SEO value.
The Solution
A Shopify store built on Debut (one of Shopify’s standard themes) and tailored to Fika’s brand identity:
- Tailored theme: built on Debut, a deliberate choice to stay close to Shopify best practices, and styled to reflect Fika’s Scandinavian aesthetic
- Content migration: every page, product and blog post moved, with redirects so old links and search rankings carried over
- Product photography treatment: consistent image handling that respects the brand’s visual standards
- Order pickup across three locations: customers order online and collect from the location that suits them, with extra functionality built on Shopify’s local pickup to handle pickup timing
The Result
The project won Best store migration in the Overall builds category at the 2020 Shopify Commerce Awards, as announced by Shopify. Fika came to me in the early weeks of COVID-19, looking to lift online sales and add pickup options, and left with a store that sells online and supports pickup across its three locations.