A full Shopify rebuild for a premium custom sneaker brand launching in South Africa – a mobile-first store built around a photo-to-print customisation engine, timed to a hard physical retail launch date.
Kixi came to Maverick to replace a prior development team that wasn’t delivering to the pace or technical standard the brand needed. With two kiosk-style retail locations opening at Mall of Africa and Gateway Theatre of Shopping in mid-July 2026, and a brand-awareness launch event scheduled for the same week, there was no room for the build to slip.
The site had to do more than sell sneakers – it had to run Kixi’s entire online customisation model. Customers upload a photo, artwork or design of their own, see it mapped onto the printable panel of the sneaker, choose their lace colour, and approve a proof before anything goes to print. Every one of those choices needed to flow into Shopify as structured order data: no manual re-keying, no room for a mismatched print.
We built Kixi on Shopify with the personalisation configurator as the technical centre of the build. After evaluating third-party configurator apps against Kixi’s specific requirements – 3D panel mapping, image upload and basic editing, mobile rendering quality and clean data output – we integrated the chosen tool directly into the product page.
Customers upload an image, see it mapped and previewed on the sneaker’s printable panel, adjust it, and select a lace colour, all before adding to cart. On confirmation, that entire configuration – artwork file, panel identifier, lace colour SKU and a print-ready composite – passes into the Shopify order as Line Item Properties, with hidden fields carrying the data Kixi’s factory needs to produce the shoe, invisible to the customer.
Everything downstream was built to match. Stitch Payments handles checkout; Courier Guy via Shiprazor handles shipping and label generation.
The homepage carries a lightweight, performance-conscious animation layer – full of movement without compromising mobile load speed – and every core page, from Home and About to the FAQ, policies and the customisable sneaker collection and product pages, was built mobile-first from the ground up, since that is how the overwhelming majority of Kixi’s audience shops.
