Random Acts of Poetry
Two Shopify theme builds for an Etsy poetry and journal shop. A finished custom theme, then a native rebuild with live cover personalization.
Random Acts of Poetry sells personalized journals and poetry goods on Etsy. Chapter one, THE KEEPSAKE, was a complete custom theme: an unfolding-letter hero, a three-question gift finder, and a live cover preview across forty-four leatherette colors. It went from a failing first review to a 3 of 3 pass.
Chapter two rebuilt it as a native Online Store 2.0 theme with recipient and occasion navigation across 210 catalog records and twelve personalized products, each with its own option rules and a cover that re-renders as the shopper types.
Screenshot coming
Stack
- Shopify Liquid, Online Store 2.0 sections and blocks
- Vanilla custom elements, no framework
- An offline Liquid preview harness
- Playwright tests, Theme Check
Decisions
- Twelve products, twelve rule sets. Each listing's color chart, font menu, and house style live in the data; one configurator engine expresses twelve contracts instead of one averaged experience.
- Configurable where the merchant lives. Thirty-five sections and twenty-three authored blocks keep every content decision inside the theme editor; interactivity is eighteen dependency-free custom elements.
- The cover preview renders synthetically, not from photo mockups, so it is reliable every time and could be built while the store connection waited.
Lessons
- The builder never self-grades. Independent review rounds took the first theme from 6.5 to a pass and produced about thirty fixes a self-review would have missed.
- Public browse data is enough for a local demo, never for a production import. Every record gets reconciled against the owner's official export before launch.