WXM Clothing
Building a seamless Shopify experience for a streetwear brand backed by one of sport's most talked-about stories.
Wrexham AFC's rise from non-league football to global cultural phenomenon is one of the most compelling stories in modern sport. Co-owned by Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, the club has transcended its Welsh roots to become a brand recognised and followed worldwide - and that cultural momentum created the perfect environment for WXM Clothing to emerge. The brainchild of footballer Ollie Palmer and backed by the support of Ryan Reynolds himself, WXM is a streetwear brand built at the intersection of football culture, community and style. With the kind of profile and attention that most emerging clothing brands spend years trying to build, the product and the shopping experience needed to be worthy of the moment. Esben Studio was brought in by the founding team to build and manage the WXM Shopify store - creating a seamless, design-led e-commerce experience that reflected the energy of the brand and converted the attention it was generating into sales.
Client
WXM Clothing
Year
2025
Services
Shopify, Art Direction
A store built for scale
E-commerce in the streetwear and lifestyle space is as much about feel as it is about function. Every design decision, every layout choice, every piece of UX thinking either reinforces the brand or undermines it. We approached the WXM Shopify build with that in mind throughout. The design language was developed to sit in harmony with the WXM brand identity - the energy, the attitude and the cultural context that makes it distinctive. Navigation was kept clean and intuitive. Product presentation was given the space to breathe. The journey from landing to checkout was stripped of anything that created unnecessary friction or interrupted the flow. We leant into and leveraged the Wrexham momentum for positive traction. The result was a store that felt like WXM - not a generic template with a logo dropped in, but a considered digital environment that reflected the brand's character at every scroll.
UX for sales
WXM had something most e-commerce brands spend years and significant marketing budgets trying to generate - genuine, organic attention from a passionate and culturally engaged audience, built from Wrexham's Netflix documentary. The challenge wasn't driving traffic. It was making sure the store was built to convert it. We applied e-commerce UX best practices throughout the build - from product page structure and imagery presentation to cart behaviour, mobile optimisation and checkout flow. Every decision was made with the end customer in mind: someone who arrives with enthusiasm for the brand and needs to be given every reason to complete a purchase without a single unnecessary obstacle in their way. Managing the store on an ongoing basis also meant keeping the experience consistent as new products were added, collections updated and the brand continued to grow.
