Why we run three brands from one Shopify store, and what Shopify gives you for it

Why three brands, not one

Our catalogue is art: prints, personalised nursery pieces and commissioned watercolours. The same studio, the same suppliers, the same order queue. But the people buying are three different groups. Someone decorating a living room, a parent setting up a nursery, and someone ordering a personalised piece as a gift do not search for the same things, and a single shop that tries to speak to all three ends up speaking clearly to none of them.

So we split the catalogue into three brands: DiviArts Studio for wall art, Fern & Nest for nursery and baby, and Forever Artify for custom commissions. Each has its own domain, its own name and its own look. Each product belongs to one of them.

What the split did not change is the business behind it. One catalogue, one set of suppliers, one order queue, one person answering customer email. The question was how to give shoppers three brands without giving ourselves three businesses to run.

What we weighed

Six arrangements, roughly from most separate to least. The comparison page sets out the costs in general; this is how each looked for our store.

Three separate Shopify stores

Three subscriptions, three admins, three catalogues. The subscriptions were not the problem. The problem was that every app we used would have to be bought and configured three times, and every product we added would have to be added in three places or kept in step by a sync app. For a print catalogue where a design can be offered in many sizes, that is a lot of rows to keep identical.

Shopify Plus expansion stores

Plus includes up to ten stores on one contract: a main store and nine expansion stores, under one organisation. That solves the subscription count, not the duplication. Shopify’s help centre is direct about it: “store settings, products, collections, and inventory aren’t synced between stores.” Apps and theme licences are per store too. It is the right answer when brands need separate admins, staff or checkouts. We needed none of those, and the price is set for businesses that do.

A headless build

A custom storefront on Shopify’s APIs gives full control of every page. It also turns three storefronts into software we would maintain forever, and it still cannot share a cart across separate root domains. Too much engineering for a problem that turned out to be three files.

Subdomains of one root

Fern & Nest at something like nursery.diviartsstudio.com, which we never set up. Subdomains can share a cart and sit under one domain’s name, which is exactly why we did not want them: the parent brand’s name is in every sub-brand’s address. Fern & Nest is not a department of DiviArts Studio to the person buying from it.

Everything redirecting to one parent domain

The brand domains exist but forward to the main store. Clean for search, simple to run, and the address bar always shows the parent. Same objection as subdomains, only stronger.

One store, several domains

One Shopify store with each brand’s domain attached as an alias domain, so each serves the storefront under its own name. One catalogue, one stock figure, one subscription, one set of apps. The brands differ in what the shopper sees, not in what we administer.

What we chose, and why

The last one. It was the only arrangement where adding a product, changing a price or processing an order happens once, and where each brand still has its own name in the address bar.

The cost was accepting what one store means: one admin, one checkout that looks the same whichever brand you bought from, and no cart shared between brands. For us none of those mattered yet. If one does later, separate stores are still available, and nothing about starting on one store prevents it.

What Shopify gives you for it

More than we expected, and all of it on a standard plan:

• Alias domains. Add a domain under Settings › Domains, turn its redirect off, and it serves the storefront under its own hostname. How that setting works.
• One theme that can change per domain. Liquid can read the hostname of each request. Our theme uses it to pick the brand, then loads that brand’s logo, colours and copy from a metaobject. Three brands, one theme to maintain.
• One catalogue and one stock figure. A print sells once, from whichever brand sold it. Nothing to reconcile.
• One order queue. Fulfilment, returns and customer service in one place, whatever domain the order came from.
• Markets, for a different job. Shopify Markets handles countries, currencies and languages. It is not a brand feature, and we did not use it as one. How Umbrella treats Markets.

Two things always move to the primary domain regardless: checkout, and customer account login. Shopify controls both. Shoppers are used to that, but you should see it in a test order before a customer points it out.

What it did not give us

Every page loaded on every domain, branded correctly. Orders arrived. Nothing in the admin suggested anything was missing. Then we opened the three files a launch checklist rarely includes.

• The sitemap. All three domains served the same sitemap.xml, listing the whole catalogue, with only the hostname rewritten. Each brand was telling search engines it sold every other brand’s products. Why Shopify does this.
• The canonical tag. On Fern & Nest and Forever Artify, every product page’s canonical named the DiviArts Studio domain. Each brand’s own pages credited a different storefront. Why it names the primary.

Neither is a setting. Shopify generates the sitemap and does not let you filter it, and the canonical comes from the theme layout. The full measurement, on this store, is on the multi-storefront SEO page.

Fixing those files is what Umbrella does: a sitemap per brand listing only that brand’s URLs, a canonical naming the brand that owns each page, and a robots.txt on each domain that points to its own sitemap. Our store was its first install. What a search engine then does with three accurate sets of files is its decision, not ours, and this series will not pretend otherwise.

Next in the series

Part 2 is the setup itself: connecting the three domains in Umbrella, assigning products to brands, the one edit inside the theme, and checking each domain’s files from the outside.

• The series and the full checklist
• Four ways to run several brands on Shopify, with costs
• Umbrella documentation

Install on Shopify