Every list of Shopify stores you find says roughly the same thing, in the same order, about the same brands. Most of them copy each other.
So I did the boring part instead. I opened the source of each store in this list and checked what it actually runs on. Twenty-three of them came back confirmed, in September 2026, and four turned out to be running headless setups that no list mentions.
Here is what I found, and what a developer notices that a screenshot won't tell you.
How I checked this list
A classic Shopify store is easy to spot. Open the page source, look for an asset served from cdn.shopify.com or a Shopify.theme object, and you have your answer in about four seconds.
Headless stores are where the lists get it wrong. The brand keeps Shopify for the catalog, the cart and the checkout, but the pages are rendered by its own front end. Those markers disappear from the homepage, and a shallow check concludes the brand left the platform.
It didn't. The response headers still carry Shopify traces, and /products.json usually answers on the domain. Gymshark is the clearest case: nothing on the homepage says Shopify, and it is very much a Shopify store.
A handful of brands I expected to confirm didn't come back clean, so they are not in this list. That is the whole point of checking.
The 23 stores, at a glance
| Store | Sector | Setup |
|---|---|---|
| Allbirds | Footwear | Classic theme |
| Fenty Beauty | Beauty | Classic theme |
| Glossier | Beauty | Classic theme |
| SKIMS | Apparel | Classic theme |
| Kylie Cosmetics | Beauty | Classic theme |
| Fashion Nova | Apparel | Classic theme |
| Stanley 1913 | Drinkware | Classic theme |
| Dr. Squatch | Personal care | Classic theme |
| Ridge | Accessories | Classic theme |
| Brooklinen | Home textiles | Classic theme |
| Mejuri | Jewelry | Classic theme |
| Chubbies | Apparel | Classic theme |
| Death Wish Coffee | Food and drink | Classic theme |
| Gymshark | Activewear | Headless |
| Le Slip Français | Apparel | Classic theme |
| Merci Handy | Personal care | Classic theme |
| Cabaia | Accessories | Classic theme |
| Jimmy Fairly | Eyewear | Classic theme |
| Balibaris | Menswear | Classic theme |
| Lunii | Kids and audio | Classic theme |
| Respire | Personal care | Headless |
| Tediber | Bedding | Headless |
| Horace | Men's grooming | Headless |
The four that went headless
This is the split worth your attention, because it maps to a real decision and a real budget.
Gymshark built a community before it built a catalog, and it holds enormous traffic peaks on launch days. At that scale, owning the front end starts to pay for itself.
Tediber sells a small catalog at a high average order value. When you sell six products and each sale is worth several hundred euros, every point of conversion justifies controlling the rendering.
Respire and Horace are the interesting ones, because neither is a giant. They show the setup has come down within reach of brands that aren't Gymshark.
Before you copy them: headless means building and maintaining a front end that Shopify would otherwise hand you for free. It buys design freedom and performance headroom, and it costs developer time forever. I've written about who Hydrogen and headless actually make sense for, including the cases where the answer is no.
What the good ones have in common
I open plenty of store code. The best ones share the same reflexes, and none of them are about taste.
They load fast. Google has shown that 53% of mobile visitors abandon a site that takes more than 3 seconds to display. A gorgeous but slow store loses half its crowd before the homepage even shows. I've laid out the levers that count in my guide to optimizing a Shopify store's speed.
Their product page does the job: sharp photos, a clear benefit at the top, visible customer reviews, and a buy button you don't have to hunt for.
And they answer on mobile first, where the majority of e-commerce traffic lives. A paid theme won't save you if your world looks just like your neighbor's.
The French side is further along than the lists suggest
Nine of the 23 are French, which no international list bothers to mention.
Le Slip Français migrated to Shopify Plus in October 2023, and Shopify published it as a case study: the eco-responsible apparel brand saw conversions climb after the switch. Proof that a well-run migration shows up in the numbers.
Merci Handy goes ultra-colorful where Respire goes clean and restrained. Opposite worlds, same rigor on the buying experience. Cabaia, Jimmy Fairly, Balibaris and Lunii each run classic themes, which is worth saying out loud: at their size, they didn't need headless to look sharp.
Stores I've built
The examples above, I didn't make them. These ones, I did.
Mabonatur, a Spanish store, was dragging on mobile. After the performance and technical SEO work, +42% mobile performance. That's exactly the kind of gain you can't see with the naked eye but that shows up in the average cart.
Aum World, a furniture store, got a full redesign: UX, technical SEO, product pages reworked from top to bottom. Faire De La Mode is a jewelry store I launched for the Canadian market. L'Aubalieu, a Swiss cosmetics brand, I pulled out of WooCommerce and rebuilt cleanly on Shopify.
And L'Enjeu RSE Jeunesse, a non-profit, I moved from WordPress to Shopify: site redesign, new features, and a page-by-page redirect plan so it wouldn't lose its rankings in the process.
You can browse the rest of my projects in my work section.
What I take from all of them
Consistency, and almost nothing else. A clear identity, a speed that keeps up, a buying journey you don't have to think about to finish. A store that loads fast and simply tells you what it sells beats a slick but sluggish one nearly every time.
The headless four earn their setup because their scale or their margin pays for it. The other nineteen prove you can look this good on a theme.
If you want to know where yours stands on these points, that's precisely what I look at in my audit: the code, the speed, the journey. I tell you what's holding it back, and how to unblock it.
