Archives: Websites

Chop Shop Store sells t-shirts, prints, enamel pins, patches, stickers, hats, mugs and jewelry built around the art and design of Thomas Romer, spanning pop-culture collections such as Altered States of America and Cats and Dogs alongside licensed partnerships with science organizations including The Planetary Society and the SETI Institute. The store runs on Shopify.

Website Design

Dark panels against a near-white ground. CSS custom properties define a background pair running from near-black (13,13,13 and 24,24,24) to light grey (235,235,235) and white, so sections alternate between dark art-forward blocks and plain product grounds.

Poppins throughout. Both the body and the header and menu font variables resolve to Poppins, a geometric sans, used at a consistent weight across navigation, product names and marketing copy.

Category-led navigation. The mega menu splits into Everything, Pop Culture, Shop Partners, and Space and Science, each with its own sub-list: Altered States of America under Pop Culture, The Planetary Society and Yugen Jewelry under Partners, Mars Missions and Eclipse 2024 under Space.

Shopping Experience

A running incentive bar. A scrolling announcement strip repeats one offer, buy three or more tees at retail price for 20 percent off, applied automatically with no code required.

A wide payment list. The cart accepts American Express, Apple Pay, Bancontact, Diners Club, Discover, Google Pay, iDEAL, Wero, Mastercard, PayPal, Shop Pay, Venmo and Visa, more payment rails than most stores of this size expose.

A free-shipping nudge in the cart. The slide-out cart confirms qualification for free shipping once a threshold is met, shown both when an item is added and when the cart drawer is reopened, alongside a live subtotal.

Brand Storytelling

Two audiences under one roof. The catalogue pairs conventional pop-culture merchandise, SciFi and Fantasy, Radio and Podcasts, Typography, with a Shop Partners section built around real organizations: The Planetary Society, Explore Mars, Yuri’s Night, the Committee of Seventy and Unistellar, each with its own product line.

A single named designer. The site’s own description credits its output to one person, Thomas Romer, framing the catalogue as one artist’s work rather than a multi-brand marketplace.

Iconic collections named directly. A homepage module labeled Iconic Collection groups the store’s longest-running designs together, distinguishing legacy prints from newer seasonal drops without a separate archive page.

Notable Features

Jewelry alongside apparel. A Yugen Jewelry line of necklaces, earrings, bracelets, rings and unisex pieces sits inside the Partners section, a category not typical of a band or fandom tee shop.

Games as a top-level category. Rockstar and WeRobot appear under a dedicated Games nav item alongside a They Might Be Giants EP, mixing physical games and music merchandise into the same store.

Science advocacy folded into retail. Planetary Advocacy and Planetary Radio sit as navigable categories next to ordinary product collections, treating an advocacy organization’s programming as browsable shop content.

Chop Shop Shop Category page example

Chop Shop Product page example

Chop Shop Checkout page example

Chop Shop footer example