Case studies / PawGuard
PawGuard
PawGuard case study: a fully custom Shopify build for a new DTC brand, live in July 2026.
Ireland's newest wireless dog fence brand had to look established on its first day. We wrote the theme from scratch, designed 108 images, set up Shopify Markets without Plus, and launched with a verified 1.4-second LCP.
- Client
- PawGuard, part of Cooney's Group, Ireland
- Platform
- Shopify, standard plan
- Live since
- 1 July 2026
- Store
- pawguard.ie
What we delivered
- Custom Shopify theme, written from scratch
- DTC launch, kickoff to live store
- 108 brand and product images
- 16 content pieces
- Shopify Markets setup
- Speed optimisation
- Google marketing stack
Stack: Shopify (standard plan), Liquid, JavaScript for the filter engine, Shopify Markets, GA4, Google Tag Manager, Merchant Center, Search Console, Meta Pixel-ready.
The brief
Wireless dog fences were already a settled category in Ireland. Legacy US names such as PetSafe and SportDog had decades of installed collars behind them, and PawGuard was arriving as a new name, on a standard Shopify plan.
Fence buyers seldom know a model number. They know the size of the garden, the size of the dog, whether barking is the problem and whether they want GPS or radio. A catalogue sorted by SKU would have pushed them back to Amazon.
Two more conditions came with the brief. The store had to sell across borders with per-variant shipping rates from launch, which most brands only get on Plus, and every marketing action had to be tracked from the first order.
The full homepage, captured from the live store in September 2026. Visit pawguard.ie
How we built it
There is no premium theme underneath pawguard.ie. The hero, the section architecture and the discovery grid are custom Liquid and JavaScript, and the homepage opens on the choice a buyer is actually making: garden size, dog size, and the problem to solve.
Product pages carry a brand nobody knows yet. Across 15 SKUs, from the Freedom Plus Fence flagship to the 830 GPS Wireless Fence and the compact T710S small-dog trainer, we produced 93 product images. Each page opens on one strong first image, then lifestyle shots, feature callouts and a strip of technical specs. Another 15 images were made for the homepage.
The words were written for Irish buyers. Product copy, category pages, the homepage and the FAQ, 16 documents in all, cover rural and urban gardens, waterproofing for Irish weather, and the legal context of the Animal Health and Welfare Act 2013.
Filters that start with the garden, not the SKU.
The filter engine is ours: not an app, not a theme setting. It asks four questions (garden size, dog size, bark control, GPS or radio), so a visitor who taps "large garden" and "medium dog" lands on the right group of products in one step.
The Shop menu follows the same logic. Six product families, sorted by fence type and each with its own photograph, sit one hover away, and a second menu splits the range by pet.
Plus-style shipping on a standard plan.
Shopify Markets runs the domains, hreflang, geo prompts and per-market shipping profiles, so the store was ready to sell abroad on launch day.
Per-variant shipping rates usually push a brand towards Plus. Here every variant sits in its own shipping profile, so each one is charged its own rate without the Plus subscription.
Tuned to a 1.4-second LCP.1.4 s
Custom code is not fast by default. A compression pipeline for every image, lazy loading below the fold, and removing every Shopify block the store did not use brought the verified largest contentful paint down to 1.4 seconds.
That speed protects Google Ads quality scores as directly as it protects the conversion rate.
Tracked before the first order.
Merchant Center was approved on the domain, Search Console verified with the sitemap submitted, and a Google Tag Manager container and GA4 property were live before launch, alongside one pass of technical and on-page SEO.
Shopping Ads could start on day one, and every marketing action has been measurable since.
Design work
108 images, designed in-house.
Product, lifestyle and category imagery for pawguard.ie, from the same build: 93 product images across 15 SKUs and 15 for the homepage, finished to one standard.
Design work © 2026 Aqsa Shahzad Official LLC, created for PawGuard and shown as a record of the build. PawGuard and its product names belong to their owners.
Fifteen screens of pawguard.ie on a phone, captured on 21 October 2026: the homepage and menu, the fence guide, the FAQs and the pages of nine products.Design work © 2026 Aqsa Shahzad Official LLC, created for PawGuard and shown as a record of the build. PawGuard and its product names belong to their owners.
What launch day delivered.
The build in four numbers, and what they meant for a brand that went live on 1 July 2026.
- Verified LCP, in the top 5% of Shopify stores
- 1.4 s
- Brand images: 93 across 15 SKUs, 15 for the homepage
- 108
- Content pieces: product pages, categories, homepage, FAQ
- 16
- Premium themes used
- 0
- Shopping Ads ready on day one. Merchant Center, Search Console, GTM and GA4 were live before the first sale.
- Plus-tier capability on the standard plan. Per-variant shipping and multi-market selling without the Plus subscription.
- A storefront that owns its category. Discovery filters a templated competitor cannot copy, and a design that reads as pet tech rather than a theme demo.
- The build became our launch package. The same custom theme approach, image library, content, Markets setup and Google stack now run for the next brands we launch.
Launch your private-label brand in 4 weeks, under $40,000.
What PawGuard got, as a fixed package: a custom Shopify theme written from scratch, ten products set up and ready to sell, and a launch date four weeks after kickoff. One price, quoted in writing before we start.
Fixed scope. Extra products, imagery and content are priced per item, in writing, before they are added.
- Theme
- Custom, from scratch
- Products
- 10, ready to sell
- Timeline
- 4 weeks to launch
- Price
- Under $40,000, fixed
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