Dime & Nickel

Dime & Nickel is the home for a group of consumer brands. Dime Trading makes audio products, from amplified and portable mics to Bluetooth speakers. Kidirace sells radio control toys. Croove, Little Experimenter, Starktoy and Little Pretender each had a Shopify store too, and about 10 trademarked brands had none. The team wanted every brand under one store with one checkout.

The brief covered a multi-brand store with each brand as its own collection, so the team could send traffic to the main store or to one brand. The founder sketched two layouts. One showed every brand as a free-standing store with a shared checkout. The other showed a mall where shoppers walk from Dime Trading into the other brands.

A customer who wanted products from two brands had to check out on two stores. Each brand ran its own Shopify store, with its own cart, checkout and admin. The team wanted one checkout for every brand.

About 10 trademarked brands had no Shopify store at all, so they had nowhere to sell online. Building a store for each one would only add more stores and checkouts to manage.

Traffic had no central place to land. With separate stores, every link and campaign pointed at one brand. The team wanted the choice of sending people to the main store or straight to a single brand.

Each brand still had to feel like itself. The founder's first choice was for every brand to look like a free-standing store. That had to work inside one Shopify store with one checkout, or the project would fall back to the mall layout led by Dime Trading.

• 01 Scoping call and access to six stores We started with a discovery call on May 8, 2024 and sent the team minutes of the meeting with next steps. The project started on May 16. The team shared collaborator codes for Dime Trading, Croove, Little Experimenter, Kidirace, Starktoy and Little Pretender, and we sent a request to each store.
• 02 Design from the founder's two illustrations The founder drew two illustrations of the store he wanted. One, in color, showed each brand as a free-standing store feeding one central checkout. The other showed a mall where shoppers enter through Dime Trading and move into the other brands. We used both to plan how the brands would sit in one Shopify store, then created the full UI/UX and all graphics in-house.
• 03 A page and collection for each brand We organized each brand into its own collection, from Dime Trading's mics and Bluetooth speakers to Kidirace's radio control toys. Every brand has a dedicated page with its own header, contact page and collection structure, so the team can send people to the main store or straight to one brand.
• 04 One checkout across every brand Every brand sells through the same Shopify store on Dawn and one checkout, so a single cart can hold products from several brands. That replaces a separate cart and checkout on each of the six stores, and the combined store runs at dimeandnickel.com under one name.
• 05 A catalog built for a large inventory We set the store up for a large range, with bulk product imports from Amazon and a catalog organized brand by brand so the team can manage it easily. Orders are fulfilled through both Amazon and Shopify.