Case Study · eCommerce · Shopify Build & Operations
Kook Lab
A Shopify build and two years of store operations for a founder-led protective headwear brand. He engineers the product. Remote CNTRL runs the store around it.
eCommerce · Shopify Build & Operations · Product Photography · 2024 to Present
4
New Styles, From One At Launch
32
Variants Live
130
eCommerce Images Shot In-House
01 · The Brief
The Kook Lab makes protective headwear for people who hit their heads doing what they love: surf, foil, wing, SUP, snow. It is a founder-led brand in the truest sense, one person who engineers the product, works the factory relationships, and lives in the category. What he did not have was time to run a store, and the engagement arrived the way most Remote CNTRL work does, by referral.
The division of labor was set early and held for two years. The founder owns the product: design, engineering, manufacturing, and the fulfillment partners behind it. Remote CNTRL owns the commercial layer: the storefront, the catalog, the photography, the measurement, and the operational decisions in between.
02 · The Build
The store was the smallest part. Around the Shopify build grew the infrastructure a product company actually runs on: SKU and barcode architecture for the factory labels and the 3PL, the warehouse integration on the Shopify side, a wholesale one-sheet and consignment tracker for the retail accounts, a stockists page as those accounts came on, an affiliate program, and promotions built natively in the store. The product pages got the same attention, built to sell a technical product: feature hotspots on the construction, and a magnifier over the underneath shot.
Measurement came with it. Signal, Remote CNTRL’s digital foundation setup, is deployed and complete: Search Console, GA4, and the SEO groundwork underneath, so a small brand makes decisions from data instead of feel.
03 · The Catalog
When the brand launched, there was one style in seven colorways. Today there are four styles at eight colorways and prints each, 32 variants live, and nearly all of it photographed in-house: about 130 eCommerce images shot and retouched for the store.
The catalog also carries the engagement’s character. When the 2026 collection was ready to sell before the full production run had landed, the launch did not wait. Everything in hand was photographed, swatches temporarily held the variants still in transit, and finished photography replaced them as product arrived. Momentum first, completeness close behind.
04 · The Store in Frame
Storefront · Site Scroll
eCommerce · Shot In-House
eCommerce · Shot In-House
Video · PDP Feature Hotspots
05 · The Counsel
Two years of ongoing consulting ran alongside the build: brand direction as the identity evolved, pricing strategy implemented into the store’s wholesale and discount structure, and website design decisions as the assortment grew.
The best example is the social strategy, which was sized to the operator instead of the playbook. The founder was never going to run a content calendar, so the advice was simple: have the community add the brand as a collaborator on their posts. Nearly the entire profile has been built that way, a feed that fills itself with real riders in real water while the founder stays in the shop.
06 · The Trajectory
Year over year, total sales grew 28 percent. The growth is quality, not volume: average order value rose 16 percent, the returning customer rate climbed 39 percent, and discounting fell by more than half over the same period. Sales grew while the brand leaned less on promotion, which is the pricing strategy doing exactly what it was implemented to do.
The 2026 drop pulled its weight immediately: the four new styles already account for roughly half of the year’s sales, on shelves for only part of it.
The assortment tells its own story: one style to four, seven variants to 32, a wholesale network and an affiliate program that did not exist at launch, and reviews now arriving on the store. All of it without a dollar of paid advertising behind it.
He builds the product. We run the store.
That is the model for founder-led brands: Remote CNTRL as the commercial layer around one person’s product obsession, from the storefront to the barcode architecture, with advice shaped to how the founder actually operates. Two years in, it still runs that way.
