How Heller Furniture built a brand-first Shopify store

Heller Furniture is a unique business, a 50-year-old design brand with award-winning furniture and accessories. They are the most sustainable modern outdoor furniture business in the world. Their products reside in permanent collections at MoMA, The Met, and the Smithsonian. 

Because their furniture requires a longer consideration cycle, while their accessories are more impulse purchases, they needed distinct experiences for each aspect of their business. 

But translating their heritage brand into a digital storefront posed a challenge: how do you create a unique experience that balances inspiration, education, and conversion, especially when your assortment ranges from high consideration pieces to impulse buys?

For Hunter Huebsch, Chief Digital Officer at Heller Furniture, the answer was Instant.

The challenge: Different experiences for different shoppers

Heller’s catalog spans two distinct buying behaviors:

• High-consideration furniture: modern, museum-worthy design pieces

• Impulse-friendly Hellerware accessories: playful, colorful tableware 

These required different pathways, different messaging, and different UX expectations, all on a single Shopify Plus site.

Hunter explains the limitation they were facing:

“The Shopify platform is undeniably the best e-commerce solution available. However, when it comes to rapidly developing immersive, responsive front-end experiences that meet our customers' needs, you're limited by the constraints of your theme. Developing theme customizations is inefficient and requires significant time, effort, and development budgets.”

And the more customization you add, the harder it becomes to maintain and evolve the site over time, a critical blocker for a design-centric brand with constant storytelling needs.

The solution: Modular, flexible theme sections

Heller adopted Instant to replace slow theme development with flexible, modular site-building.

“Instant provides the best tool for rapidly developing and deploying custom customer experiences.” 

Using Instant’s Blog templates, Product templates, Collection templates, and modular design sections, Heller built a storefront that feels editorial, expressive, and distinctly theirs.

They now create sections that:

Showcase museum placements and archival design stories.

Highlight collaborations with Frank Gehry, Mario Bellini, and Philippe Starck. 

Communicate their Worry Free Plastics sustainability technology.

All while balancing sophistication with the brand’s playful, democratic design voice

“We've used Instant to create rich storytelling modules that honor our design heritage—from showcasing our Vignelli-designed branding (they also created the identities for American Airlines and CVS) to highlighting collaborations.”

The Instant impact: Speed meets brand fidelity

For Heller, the biggest shift has been speed, paired with brand fidelity.

“The most transformative impact has been our ability to rapidly develop responsive, mobile-first sections that enrich our product experiences and deepen our brand storytelling. With a small team, we've been able to customize our storefront to honor the legacy Massimo and Lella Vignelli created for us—maintaining that perfect balance of taking modern design seriously while taking ourselves less so.”

Tailored experiences for every customer journey

Heller now spins up brand experiences tailored to different customer journeys, without theme customization constraints.

“Instead of being locked into rigid templates, we can rapidly deploy sections that respond to market opportunities—whether that's creating gift guides featuring our Oprah-selected Max dinnerware, building landing pages for our Swell collection collaboration with California surfer Anna Dawson, or developing rich product narratives that connect our pieces to their presence in major museums worldwide.”

Now, they have dedicated experience that speaks to their different customer journeys, whether that’s architects browsing their Bellini Collection, design enthusiasts discovering their Frank Gehry Left Twist Cubes, or young professionals finding their first piece of museum-quality design. And they can quickly iterate and test content that highlights their unique value propositions (made in USA manufacturing, products designed to last generations, and a closed-loop recycling program).

Preserving what makes Heller, Heller

Most importantly, Instant helps preserve what makes Heller… Heller. Allowing them to maintain the elevated, design-forward experience their brand demands while ensuring technical performance.

“Out-of-the-box Shopify themes simply can't capture the essence of a brand that's been breaking boundaries since 1971. With Instant, we can honor our heritage of democratic design—making museum-quality pieces accessible—while building a digital storefront worthy of the designers we collaborate with.”

Your brand deserves better than a template

Heller proves that the right tools can unlock the right experience. With Instant, they transformed a 50-year heritage into a dynamic digital storefront, without sacrificing speed, brand fidelity, or their small team's sanity.

“It's the difference between just selling furniture and inviting customers into the Heller story of modern design.” 

If your Shopify store feels constrained by your theme, it's time for an upgrade. Discover how Instant helps brands like Heller build better Shopify themes. Start building with Instant now →