Balliets has anchored luxury fashion in Oklahoma City for nine decades without ever selling a single item on the internet. In its 90th anniversary year, Resite360 built the Shopify store that changed that.
Ninety years of brick and mortar, zero years of e-commerce
Balliets is an Oklahoma City institution. For roughly 90 years it has dressed the city in designer fashion the old way: a real sales floor, real relationships, and a staff that knows its clients by name. That kind of longevity is rare in retail, and it earns a kind of trust no website can fake.
But it also meant the store's entire operation - inventory, merchandising, sales - was built around a physical floor. When Balliets decided to sell online for the first time in its history, the question wasn't just "which platform?" It was "how do we go online without becoming just another online store?"
Balliets, Oklahoma City - nine decades on the sales floor
The Challenge
Take a legacy brand online without cheapening it
Most Shopify builds start with a product feed and a theme. This one couldn't. A luxury retailer with 90 years of reputation doesn't get a second chance at a first impression online, and a generic storefront would have undermined everything the name stands for.
Three problems had to be solved at once:
The brand. The store had to feel like walking into Balliets - editorial, unhurried, and premium - not like scrolling a discount rack.
The data. Decades of in-store inventory had never been structured for the web. Designer catalogs, product attributes, and tagging all had to be built from the ground up before a single product page could exist.
The operation. The online store had to fit how the sales floor actually works, so the team could run it day to day without fighting their own systems.
What We Built
A full Shopify launch, scoped like an operation, not a template swap
Resite360 handled the launch end to end: store design, the designer product catalog, and the inventory workflows underneath it. As a Shopify developer based in Oklahoma City, we could work the way this project demanded - in the market, close to the client, with the store itself a short drive away.
The build ran on a written launch runbook: a step-by-step procedure covering store configuration, catalog structure, product imports, and go-live, so every phase had a defined "done" and nothing depended on memory. For a first-ever e-commerce launch, that discipline is the difference between a launch date and a launch drift.
The Balliets Shopify storefront
The Details That Mattered
The unglamorous work is where luxury e-commerce is won
Nobody screenshots a spreadsheet for a portfolio. But the deepest work on this project was inventory data: pulling inventory reports, building a tagging system designer by designer - rag & bone got its own dedicated tagging pass - and preparing structured tag imports so every product could be filtered, collected, and merchandised properly on the storefront.
That's what makes a luxury catalog browsable. When a client can land on the site and move cleanly through designers and categories the way they'd move through the store's departments, that's not a theme feature. That's data work done right.
On the design side, the merchandising had to carry the brand. Product photography given room to breathe, designer names treated with the same weight they get on the floor, and a catalog structure that mirrors how Balliets' own team thinks about the store. We build this way for every retailer we take online - it's the core of our e-commerce work for retail stores.
Designer catalog, built on structured taggingThe same experience, on the phone
The Result
Balliets is selling online, on its own terms
For the first time in roughly 90 years, Balliets clients can shop the store from anywhere - and the experience feels like Balliets, not like a marketplace. The storefront is live at balliets.com, running on inventory workflows the team can operate themselves.
The larger point: a legacy brand doesn't have to trade its identity for a web presence. With the data work done properly and the design held to the brand's own standard, going online became an extension of the store, not a departure from it.
Your business has a story. Let's build the site that tells it.
Whether you've been open 90 years or 9 months, you'll get a straight answer on price, timeline, and approach - usually the same day.
